Mokṣasādhana-Darśana-Vimarśa: Brahmā on the Paths to Liberation

Mokṣasādhana-darśana-vimarśa means “an examination of the means to liberation and of the different schools of thought”. It is the name given here to the closing chapters (47–51) of the Guru-Śiṣya Saṃvāda, also called the Brāhmaṇa-Gītā, found in the Anugītā section of the Mahābhārata’s Aśvamedhika Parva (the fourteenth book). In this teaching Brahmā, the creator, instructs a group of great ṛṣis, and these chapters bring his teaching to its highest point.

Chapter 47 teaches how to go beyond the three guṇas (the qualities of nature) through the picture of the great tree and the picture of the two birds. Chapter 48 sets out the ways to mokṣa (liberation) through prāṇāyāma (breath control) and presents a debate about how sattva relates to puruṣa (the conscious Self). In Chapter 49 the ṛṣis, confused again, survey the many competing schools of thought of their time. Chapter 50 gives Brahmā’s settling answer, crowned by the declaration that ahiṃsā (non-harming) is the highest dharma, together with the final ranking of the tattvas (basic principles of existence). Chapter 51 brings the whole teaching to a close.

Going Beyond the Guṇas (Chapter 47)

The elder brāhmaṇas, established in the Paramātman (Supreme Self) who is the source of the Vedas, call sannyāsa (renunciation) itself tapas (austerity), and know jñāna (true knowledge) as the very nature of Parabrahman. That Brahman, the foundation of the knowledge of the Veda, is far from the ignorant. It is beyond all pairs of opposites, without qualities, eternal, with qualities beyond thought, and supreme above all. The wise realise it through knowledge joined with tapas.

Those whose minds have been washed of impurity, who have set rajas aside, whose inner being is clean, and who, knowing Brahman, stay always in the dharma of sannyāsa, reach Parameśvara (the Supreme Īśvara) through tapas along the auspicious path. Such people, rooted in knowledge, declare:

• Tapas is a lamp that lights up the truth of the Paramātman
• Ācāra (right conduct) is the means to dharma
• Jñāna is the very nature of Parabrahman, the Paramātman
• Sannyāsa is the highest tapas of all

Whoever examines the truth and knows the nature of knowledge as needing no support, and as filling every being inside and out, becomes all-pervading. The wise person who sees union as separation, knowing that the ātman is untouched, and who sees oneness within manyness, is freed from sorrow for ever. One who desires nothing and looks down on nothing becomes Brahman even in this world. One who examines prakṛti (nature), its guṇas and its nature, and gives up the sense of “I” and “mine”, is liberated beyond doubt. The sannyāsī who is free of pairs of opposites, who wants no one’s salutations and performs no offerings to the ancestors, reaches through the dharma of sannyāsa the eternal reality beyond qualities and opposites. He has given up all good and bad karma made of the three guṇas, and both truth and untruth in their everyday sense.

The Great Tree, Again

Brahmā repeats, almost word for word, the picture of the great tree first given in Chapter 35. The body is a great tree:

Growing as an endless flow from a seed that is Brahman, this tree keeps every being alive. The wise person should cut it down with the sword of knowledge of the truth. He cuts away the bonds of attachment that throw us into the whirlpools of birth, death, old age and disease, and then becomes free of “I” and “mine”. Liberation then follows without doubt.

The Two Birds

In this same tree live two birds: the jīva (individual soul) and Īśvara. Both are always active, yet in this teaching both are lifeless in themselves: mere reflections, cast through the limiting conditions of buddhi and māyā respectively. Higher than both, and different from both, is the ātman that also lives in this body. It is full of knowledge and is pure consciousness. It is not limited to this body but is present everywhere. Nothing at all can know it, yet it alone knows all things.

Sattva, the mūlaprakṛti (root nature), which cannot be counted among the products of the guṇas, has no consciousness of its own. Different from it is the jīvātman, whom the Paramātman dwelling within fills with knowledge. The jīvātman who knows the field (the body and mind), and who has fully known all the tattvas, is beyond the guṇas and is freed from every pāpa.

The Means to Liberation (Chapter 48)

To test how deeply the ṛṣis have understood, Brahmā now presents several views, side by side, on how the tree finally relates to Brahman, instead of one single teaching.

Some hold that Brahman itself becomes the world, so the tree (saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death) is simply Brahman’s own transformation. They quote the śruti (Veda), such as “tadātmānaṃ svayam akuruta”, “It made itself into this”, and “sad eva saumya idam agra āsīt”, “In the beginning, dear one, this was Being alone”.

Others hold that the highest reality is untouched by change, and that the world within it is like a dream, only imagined. They point to the śruti’s picture of the ātman sleeping and waking. In sleep, speech with all its names enters the ātman. On waking, the life-breaths settle into their places; from the breaths arise the devatās, and from the devatās the worlds, once more. All such appearing is māyā, a many-coloured play taking place wholly within the ātman.

In this teaching both of these views, based on the śruti, are together called “the Sāṅkhya view”, which holds that all arising and dissolving take place within the avyakta (the unmanifest).

Three Levels of Reaching Mokṣa

Brahmā then gives three levels of practice by which mokṣa can be reached:

1. Even a person who, only at the moment of death, holds the mind steady and even on the ātman for as long as one breath takes, becomes fit for mokṣa.
2. Even a single moment of direct realisation beyond all thought, lasting no longer than the blink of an eye, brings clarity and peace to the wise person and gives him the unending state of kaivalya (absolute freedom).
3. Through prāṇāyāma, the person reaches the twenty-fifth tattva, the Paramātman, who is beyond even the twenty-fourth, the avyakta. Here prāṇāyāma means restraining, again and again throughout life, the ten senses together with the intellect and the mind. It is traditionally counted as having ten or twelve limbs: yama (restraints), niyama (observances), prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra (withdrawing the senses), dhāraṇā (concentration), dhyāna (meditation) and samādhi (absorption), together with tarka (reasoning) and vairāgya (detachment), or further with maitrī (friendliness), karuṇā (compassion), muditā (gladness) and upekṣā (even-mindedness).

By the power of yoga, one whose self is clear and whose sattva is pure reaches the avyakta. In such a person sattva becomes still higher; he gains a form that is pure puruṣa and becomes fit for immortality. Because the Self, whose nature is Being, is higher even than the avyakta, the greatest scholars praise nothing as greater than sattva when speaking of the means to reach it.

The Debate on Sattva and Puruṣa

The Tārkikas (logicians) hold that sattva and puruṣa are not different. Because sattva is pure like puruṣa and serves puruṣa’s purposes, they consider doership and similar properties to be real qualities of the ātman itself. In their view, forgiveness, steadiness, ahiṃsā, evenness, truthfulness, straightforwardness, knowledge, giving up and sannyāsa are the ripened fruits of sattva. Reasoning by inference, they conclude that the Self, whose nature is Being, is simply the Paramātman, and that nothing more needs to be asked.

Against this, other scholars firmly rooted in knowledge hold that the oneness of the kṣetrajña (the knower of the field) and sattva does not stand up to reason. If sattva were truly the same as puruṣa and existed eternally alongside it, the liberated Self could never rightly leave it behind, since as an ever-existing substance it could never be separated or destroyed. The opposite extreme, pure and complete non-difference, cannot stand either. If doership and similar properties were real, the thing that bears them could never perish, and release could never happen. That would mean either that there is no ātman at all, or that there is no mokṣa at all.

The settled conclusion offered is that sattva stands to puruṣa as a wave stands to the ocean. The difference is one of name and appearance. Sattva arises naturally with puruṣa, just as waves come naturally to the sea. And just as a wave that dissolves need not be “reborn”, a sattva that has been freed brings no new birth for the ātman, and mokṣa is not denied in any way. Through imagined difference, the journey of saṃsāra goes on; through the real non-difference underneath, mokṣa is achieved.

This conclusion is explained with the example of the mosquito and the udumbara (fig) fruit: the mosquito born inside the fruit shows both oneness of substance and a real difference of creature. It is also explained with the examples of the fish in water and the dewdrop on a lotus leaf. Sattva “touches” puruṣa only in appearance, through adhyāsa (superimposition, seeing one thing on top of another), while puruṣa himself stays untouched, with no real contact with the properties of sattva. The guru affirms that Brahmā’s teaching cannot be false, and so both limiting positions stand together. At this the ṛṣis, confused once more, go back to Brahmā with their doubts renewed.

The Ṛṣis’ Doubts: A Survey of Competing Views (Chapter 49)

Taking up their questions again, the ṛṣis ask Brahmā to declare which one dharma, among all that is taught, is truly the highest to follow. The many paths of dharma seem to them to contradict one another at every turn. What follows is their own survey of the many schools of thought of their age. They give it as a sign of their confusion, not as settled teaching.

On the fruit of dharma and life after death:

• Some hold that the fruit of dharma is received only after the body dies.
• The Lokāyatas (materialists) deny this flatly and hold that nothing at all follows death.
• The Syādvādins (those who say “it may be”) hold that every such claim is uncertain by nature.
• Those devoted to the seven kinds of yajña hold that there is no uncertainty at all.
• The Tairthikas hold that each view is true in its own sphere.

On the nature of existence:

• The Tārkikas and others hold that whatever arises and perishes is wholly impermanent.
• The Mīmāṃsakas hold it to be permanent, or permanent as an unbroken flow.
• The Śūnyavādins hold that nothing at all exists.
• The Saugatas hold that things exist, but only for a moment.
• The Yogācāras hold that consciousness is one single reality that appears as two: as the object, and as “I”, the subject.
• Another school holds existence to be mixed, both different and not different at once.

On dharma itself:

• Some hold dharma to be impermanent, others permanent.
• Some deny that there is any such thing as dharma.
• Others insist that dharma exists and is permanent.
• Some hold that one dharma may rightly be kept in two different ways (as an act to be done, not done, or done otherwise).
• Others hold that dharma is mixed by nature.

On Brahman, the self and substance:

• The brāhmaṇas who know the Veda and śāstras, who see the truth and have direct knowledge, hold that only Brahman, one without a second, exists.
• Those who offer upāsanā to Parameśvara with qualities hold that reality is differentiated.
• The Mīmāṃsakas hold that particular karmas alone are the true causes.
• The atomists hold that there are many causes.
• Among those learned in the Veda and śāstras, many affirm Brahman without a second; many others hold that the jīva and Īśvara are separate; and those with a still coarser view hold that many real substances exist side by side.

On space and time:

• The astronomers hold that space and time are eternal and real in themselves.
• The elders hold that whatever appears is not truly present in past, present and future, like a kingdom gained in a dream: only the play of consciousness.
• Still other Tārkikas hold that space and time are eternal and real, yet are not counted among the elements, since they have no existence apart from what fills them.

On observance and practice:

• Some communities do not keep ritual bathing at all; those who know the śāstras and Vedas and see the truth hold bathing to be best.
• Some praise eating one’s fill; others praise and faithfully keep upavāsa (fasting).
• Some praise doing karma; others praise giving up karma, the path of sannyāsa, as the true way to supreme peace.
• Some praise mokṣa above all; many chase every kind of enjoyment.
• Some want wealth, gold, vehicles and the eight kinds of power; others, drawn to detachment, prefer to own nothing at all.
• Some strive to see their iṣṭadevatā (chosen form of the Divine) face to face; others think even this unnecessary and stay indifferent.
• Some carefully keep the vow of ahiṃsā; others hold that harming is a proper duty of life.
• Some are devoted to puṇya and want fame; others hold that puṇya and fame are worthless.
• Some delight in goodwill; others stay full of doubt.
• Some practitioners endure great hardship in meditation; others meditate seated in comfort and peace.
• Some brāhmaṇas hold yajña to be supreme; some praise giving above all; some praise tapas; others hold svādhyāya (study of scripture) to be greatest.
• Some hold that knowledge can be gained only through sannyāsa; those who examine the nature of things hold that one’s own natural means, in any āśrama (stage of life), are enough without sannyāsa.
• Some praise every view equally; others refuse to praise any single view as supreme.

Having surveyed all this, the ṛṣis conclude: “O best of the immortals, since the very order of dharma is described in so many conflicting ways, we are bewildered about dharma and cannot reach a settled conclusion. Whatever one person calls the path to the highest good, another calls something else, easier still. Through these competing claims human society itself has become restless and unsteady. Whoever becomes attached to a dharma follows and praises that dharma alone.” Their minds had become unsteady and full of doubts and second thoughts. So they ask Brahmā to declare the most secret truth of all, and also to explain the cause of the relationship between the antaḥkaraṇa (inner instrument, the intellect) and the kṣetrajña.

Brahmā’s Answer: Ahiṃsā and the Final Order of the Tattvas (Chapter 50)

Brahmā, the creator of all worlds, firm in dharma, now answers briefly. He separates what should be rejected (heya) from what should be accepted (upādeya) among everything that has been raised.

Ahiṃsā is the highest dharma for all beings, binding on everyone. This is the settled view of the wise. It is free of agitation, the finest of all spiritual practices, and the very mark of dharma. Jñāna alone is the means to the highest good and the path to mokṣa. So say those firmly settled in the understanding of the Vedānta. Through pure knowledge alone a person is freed from every pāpa.

Those devoted to harm, who reject the authority of the Veda, and who are overpowered by greed and delusion, must at some time pass through the torments of Yama. Those who act with desire and attachment are born again and again in this world to enjoy worldly pleasures. Those who have the knowledge of the śāstras, who are established in the yoga of evenness, and who do their duties without craving the fruit, are the truly wise, who have the highest knowledge.

Sattva and the Knower: Object and Subject

Brahmā settles the debate raised in Chapter 48. Between sattva and the kṣetrajña there is the relationship of object and subject. Puruṣa is always the subject, the knower; sattva is by nature the object, the known. Sattva is always bound up with pairs of opposites, since it is made of the guṇas and has the nature of pleasure, pain and delusion, and it is made of parts. The form of puruṣa is its opposite: beyond opposites, eternal, without fruits and without qualities. Because the two are so opposite in nature, their relation cannot be like that of two logs stuck together with lac. Instead it is adhyāsika, a superimposed relation, like the snake seen on a rope.

Brahmā shows the “sameness” in this relation with several examples. In a dream, in māyā, in a conjuring trick, and in the rope mistaken for a snake, the superimposed thing is taken as equal to the ground it rests on. The ground, too, becomes known only through the name of the superimposed thing. In the same way sattva looks equal to puruṣa, and puruṣa, taking on the name that belongs to sattva, becomes the experiencer.

A lotus leaf is nourished by water without being truly joined to it. In the same way puruṣa, claiming sattva’s qualities as his own, “experiences” sattva while remaining untouched at heart, like a lotus leaf that holds water without getting wet. A restless drop of water on a lotus leaf cannot wet it. So too the wise puruṣa, though he seems linked to every guṇa, touches none of them. The kṣetrajña, the puruṣa, is in truth untouched, beyond all doubt.

In the rope-and-snake illusion, one may reach the firm certainty “this is a rope” even though rope and snake were never really joined. In the same way, in the moment of experience, sattva and puruṣa are grasped together as a single substance, just as the rope and the imagined snake together become “the snake” at that moment. This alone is the settled truth; all other ideas are mere bhrānti (confusion). Those grown old in wisdom give the name “sattva” to the bare substance that puruṣa experiences, and the relation of a substance to its “doer” is exactly the relation between sattva and the kṣetrajña.

Answering the Bauddha View: The Lamp

Because, in this account, sattva and puruṣa are grasped together as sattva alone, the Bauddhas (Buddhists) take this reasoning to its furthest point. They deny puruṣa entirely and hold that sattva alone is the self. Brahmā answers them: just as a lamp lights up both itself and other things, so through vidyā (knowledge, a special transformation of sattva) it becomes known that sattva and puruṣa are in truth distinct.

A person carrying a lamp walks through darkness, the lamp lighting the path step by step. In the same way the seeker of the highest truth moves along the path of practice with the help of the lamp that is sattva. In a lamp, the oil and wick keep the flame alive only as long as they last; when they run out the flame disappears, but the space it lit remains. So too sattva, kept going by karma, shows itself in its last activity, lighting up both itself and puruṣa directly. When karma is used up, only sattva vanishes. Puruṣa, the unmanifest, remains alone, the witness of the happiness of samādhi and deep sleep. So sattva is called the manifest (vyakta), and puruṣa the unmanifest (avyakta).

The Means to Knowledge: Four Pictures

Brahmā closes the debate with a series of practical pictures about seeking knowledge:

1. The dull and the intelligent: a person without understanding may labour through countless methods and still fail to gain knowledge, while an intelligent person gains it, and its happiness, with a quarter of the effort.
2. The traveller without provisions: a traveller who sets out without food suffers badly on the road and may even die halfway. In the same way, a person whose store of puṇya is weak may, even while practising yoga, reach success only with great hardship, or not at all. One’s own ability to pursue the good itself shows the good and bad impressions of one’s past births.
3. The chariot and the mountain: a traveller who tries a long, unknown road alone and on foot cannot reach the end. One drawn by a swift chariot arrives quickly, seated so high that he does not even see the low things below. But a fool, even after riding the chariot to the foot of the mountain, does not know how to climb it and suffers. The intelligent person rides as far as the road allows, then gets down and walks on to the summit. The progress of the one who has knowledge unfolds just like this, stage by stage, through his own intelligence.
4. The boat and the far shore: a person who, deluded, enters a fearsome ocean without a boat and tries to reach the far shore by swimming is inviting death and deserves to be laughed at. Just as foolish is one who tries to cross the ocean of worldly existence without taking refuge in the boat of the guru’s knowledge. The intelligent person who knows the waterways takes a boat with good oars and rudder, crosses easily, and on reaching the far shore gives up all sense of “mine” towards the boat and walks on. In the same way, having crossed the ocean of saṃsāra, the intelligent person lets go of attachment to his earlier means of practice. One who, out of delusion or fondness, clings too much to the boat just drifts back and forth in the same place, like a boatman who never gets off.

Brahmā adds a last point about adhikāra (fitness for a path). One fit for karma should not at the same time take up yoga, and one fit for yoga should not take up karma. The fruit of karma varies: the very same act is praiseworthy in a gṛhastha (householder) and a cause of downfall for a parivrājaka (wandering renunciant). A boat cannot travel on land, nor a chariot on water. In the same way, karmas done in the past bear fruit only within their own proper field.

The Tattvas as Seeds, and the Qualities of the Elements

That which has no sound, touch, form, taste or smell, and which thoughtful munis reflect on through the intellect, is called Pradhāna, also named Avyakta. The product of Avyakta is Mahat-tattva (cosmic intelligence). The product of Mahat-tattva, born of prakṛti, is Ahaṅkāra (the ego principle). From Ahaṅkāra arises the quality that produces the five mahābhūtas (great elements). The products of the five mahābhūtas are the objects of the senses, sound and the rest, known separately as the qualities of the elements.

Avyakta-prakṛti, Mahat-tattva and Ahaṅkāra are each said to have both a cause-form and an effect-form, with Ahaṅkāra turning again and again into its effect-form. Even the five mahābhūtas (the five tanmātras, subtle elements) are both cause and effect, since they produce the sense objects, sound and the rest. So they too are called bīja-dharmas, “seed-natures”. Citta (the mind-stuff) is what makes these sense objects active.

Brahmā then gives the number of qualities of each great element, and their kinds:

The Final Order of the Tattvas

Brahmā ends the whole teaching with the final ranking of the tattvas: Ākāśa is the highest of all the elements. Higher than space is ahaṅkāra; higher than ahaṅkāra is buddhi; higher than buddhi is the ātma; higher than that is avyakta (prakṛti); and higher than prakṛti is Puruṣa. Whoever knows which elements are higher and which lower, who knows all the rules of karma, and who sees every being as equal to himself, reaches the imperishable Paramātman.

The Marks of Attaining Liberation: The Teaching Ends (Chapter 51)

Brahmā, called Dhātā (the Sustainer) and Pitāmaha (the Grandfather), brings his teaching to the gathered ṛṣis to a close. He sums up the nature of the mind, the intellect and the kṣetrajña with the picture of the body as a chariot:

• The body is the chariot
• The senses are its horses
• The mind is the sārathi (charioteer)
• The intellect is the whip that drives it on

He declares once more that tapas is the universal means to every attainment. Even the grave pāpas named earlier in this teaching (killing a brāhmaṇa, drinking liquor, theft, destroying an unborn child, and going to the guru’s wife) are purified through tapas. And dhyāna-yoga (the yoga of meditation), joined with a clear and peaceful mind, is the direct path to jīvanmukti (liberation while living) and mokṣa.

At the end of this teaching Kṛṣṇa reveals to Arjuna what had been hidden in the story until now. He himself was the guru of this whole Guru-Śiṣya Saṃvāda, and his own mind was the student who received it. All of Chapters 35 to 51 had been told by Kṛṣṇa as his own Anugītā, carrying the same essence as the Bhagavad Gītā he had once given Arjuna at Kurukṣetra. Kṛṣṇa then tells Arjuna that he wishes to visit his father Vasudeva (Ānakadundubhi) and Ugrasena at Dvārakā. Arjuna suggests that they first go to Hastināpura to take leave of Yudhiṣṭhira.

Sources

• Mahābhārata, Aśvamedhika Parva, Chapters 47–50
• Mahābhārata, Aśvamedhika Parva, Chapter 51