Lights on the Upanishads

SKANDA SANATKUMARA BHUMA VIDYA

THE short paragraph at the end of the seventh chapter of the Chhandogya Upanishad closes with this statement — “The blessed Sanatkumara shows the shore beyond darkness, and him they call Skanda, yea, they call him Skanda.”¹¹⁷

Here some questions arise from the equation that is affirmed of Sanatkumara with Skanda and, indeed, from the very mention of the two names for the first time to which no reference is made elsewhere in this, or any other early, Upanishad. What is the occasion for this statement? What are the implications? Let us first state the purport of the passage with reference to the context and then proceed to consider the relevancy of these concluding lines of this section, so that we could make an effective attempt to appreciate the text in the light of the lines of thought adopted in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.

Narada, learned in the Vedic lore, well-versed in all the sciences of the age, approaches Sanatkumara for a higher knowledge. However thorough his learning be, he finds something still wanting, feels the need for that knowledge by which he could cross over to the other side of “Sorrow”. Sanatkumara grants the request of Narada and we have here a vivid description of the Indescribable, the Vast, bhūmā, the One, the Self, the seer of which sees neither death nor disease nor sorrow. At the close, the Upanishad declares that the One Self, the Vast, becomes the multiple soul, ekadhā tridhā bahudhā bhavati.

And we come to the concluding passage with which we are at present concerned. Here the Upanishad throws out hints on certain ideas pertaining to the means and the end, sādhan and siddhi and each of these ideas rests upon many others familiar to those for whom were intended these Upanishads which in effect, purpose and content were a kind of Manuals of Sadhana. Here is an English rendering of the passage: “In the purity of nourishment, åhāra, lies the purity of the stuff of being, sattva; sattva being pure, the immediate remembrance becomes constant and fixed; by this remembrance, there is release from all the knots. To such a one, stainless, the Blessed Sanatkumara shows the shore beyond darkness; they call him Skanda, yea, they call him Skanda.”¹¹⁸

To get at the purport of the sentence, we must first determine the sense and fix in our minds the exact connotation of the Sanskrit words āhāra, sattva and smrti. For there is no surer way to miss the significance of the whole passage than to rely upon any translation or lexicon, for these terms are significant and teem with a number of suggestions arising from the whole body of the teachings of this Upanishad. We must also bear in mind that the Chhandogya is one of the few earlier and authentic Upanishads which form part of the Brahmanas, where we hear of the many Vidyas, the spiritual disciplines—Sadhanas,—by which the initiate sets out to realise and live the Truth as envisaged and propagated to him by the seer, his teacher, the acārya.

From the point of view of these Vidyas, the Chhandogya is the one Upanishad that is most consulted by the author of the Brahmasutras where reference is made to the Chhandogya texts for ten Vidyas out of a dozen or more from all the major Upanishads that are taken up for clarification. Any attempt to understand the exact method of these Sadhanas is bound to meet with a very partial success at best, as the actual method is not recorded anywhere in detail. We can, from the data available in the texts, guess that the teacher who was always a seer admitted the disciple for initiation on being convinced of his fitness for receiving the Vidya. He trained him for the life, put into him the necessary seed of realisation, allowed to grow and bear fruit in the right Thus these Brahma-vidyas were communicated in silence season. Thus these Brahma-vidyas were communicated in silence through the influence and example of the Guru, rather than through precept which occupied a brief and formal place in the scheme of the spiritual culture of these ancients. We learn from the Taittiriya that Bhrigu Varuni was asked first to realise that Matter was Brahman and through successive stages by Tapas in the interval between one stage and another he realised Brahman ultimately as Ananda. This is called bhārgavi vāruņi vidyā.

This is just an instance to illustrate that these Vidyas are summarily noticed and simply named after the teacher or the pupil who practised the particular Vidya with success. There are other Vidyas which are named after the character or the central aspect of the Vidya, e.g., udgitha vidyā, samvarga vidyā, or after the most suitable form that is the nearest approach to the Truth, as in the case of bhūmā vidyā or dahara vidyā.

It is the mention of such names of Vidyas and one or two broad hints that are all that we find recorded as the Acharya’s precepts to the initiate. It is against this background we have to search for and discover the sense of the passage that we have taken up for discussion. These concluding lines gives us an idea of the Sadhana that helps one to realise the bhūmā, the Vast Self, which is the All and includes the All — the Immortal which seen, dispels all darkness and sorrow, sickness and death. We get an idea of the bhūmā from what has been stated earlier in the section. One can understand, mentally appreciate and in a way assimilate the concept of bhūmā, even allow it to dominate or recast the texture of one’s mind. That has a great value for him, the mental being; for it infuses a settled illumined faith in the mind. But still that is no realisation; a brilliant concept in itself does not go far for a living experience of the truth that is conceived, however cherished it may be in the mind.

Let us then take up the first two terms āhāraśuddhi and sattva-suddhi. Suddhi is purity. At the outset we are confronted with a difficulty. How is one to determine what is pure and what is not? If āhāra means food, as is commonly understood, and some commentators have done so, then have we to leave the question of purity in food to be decided by reference to our sentiments and prejudices or to the “religion of the kitchen ”? Āhāra means derivatively whatever is brought near and has come to mean food because it is taken in. Ahāra, according to Acharya Shankara, means knowledge of sense objects, śabdádivişayajnānam. If in sense contacts one is careful and free from desire and disgust and passion, the inner instrument, antaḥ karaṇa, called sattva here, becomes pure. Shankara has solved the problem of purity by relying on the derivative significance of āhāra and taking sattva to mean antaḥ karaña as is done in the later works and the Gita and is perfectly intelligible. Our difficulty then comes to this. Does the text mean by āhāra, food or sense mind or can it be both? Does the text mean by sattva, the inner instrument or something else which may include it? To find an answer to this question, we have fortunately clues given in the Upanishad itself.

In the previous chapter, the Upanishad has spoken of three elements, dhātus, in all food called tejas, ap, anna (Fire, Water and Earth), yielding their essential principles vāk, prāņa, manas (Speech or Voice, Life and Mind) respectively. To understand what precisely is meant by this threefold division of elements and principles, we must have a general idea of the setting of the Upanishad. Living at this distance of time, it is not easy for us to appreciate the symbolism of ceremonial rites that this Upanishad frequently resorts to in declaring the value and importance of certain religious practices of the time. Besides, it has no theories to propound; it takes up things as they present themselves to our common experience, treats men as they understand themselves to be, and directs them to courses of rites and disciplines acting to a sense of what they owe to themselves and their fellow beings as well as to the Gods. For the Vedic Gods are not entirely forgotten — as Cosmic Beings and Powers they carry on their functions within us and in the universe, have their full sway over men and things.

The Sun and Moon and Earth, the Wind, the Fire, the Waters, what to us appear as inanimate, all these are animated, directed, and controlled and presided over by the Gods. They are their concrete figures and living symbols through which approach was made to the One-without-a-second, to the God of gods, to the Self of selves. Such an understanding faith was common and current in the times of these Upanishads.

This Upanishad, then, through various upāsanās, gradually infuses an unfailing spirit in the seeker to build a deeper and inner life fit to realise the One, the Immortal. It speaks of three elements and not five as the comparatively later Taittiriya does. Every-where mostly, it makes a threefold division, trivrtkarana and not pañci-karaņa. The three essential elements in all food are tejas, ap, anna, Fire, Water and Earth. This is the creative Trinity that forms into the outer stuff of our inner being and sustains the material body which it churns, as it were, causes to yield and evolve vāk, prāņa and manas, Voice, Life and Mind. It may seen queer to the mentality of our age to be told that mind is grosser than life and life than voice or speech, and that voice is the subtlest of the three elements or dhātus that makes up the subtle substance of our being. But by voice, vāk, is meant the power of expression; it is in its source the creative Word proceeding from the tapas, the divine incubation. Hence tejas is said to be the principle of vāk. There may not be difficulty in understanding. Water, the fluidic force, to be the principle of life. But mind? Certainly it is the grossest in this scheme because it is swallowed up by the gross objects it rises from and runs after.

Thus we see that in the scheme of this Upanishad, it is these dhātus or elements vāk, prāna and manas that are the component parts of the subtle stuff of being, sattva, the purity of which is affirmed to result from purity of food, āhāra-śuddhi. We can better appreciate sattva in this sense of dhātu, when we remember the expression dhātu-prāsāda occurring in a later Upanishad.¹¹⁹

We have seen that sattva is not mind alone, but mind, life and power of expression. It is this that sustains the embodied existence here and is the vehicle of the soul in its journey to the other worlds and rebirth.

Now how is the purity to be got? In a still earlier chapter, the fifth, the Upanishad speaks of prāṇāgnihotra, the mystical oblation to the vai ſvānara, the Universal Person, in which the food that is taken in (or offered to others) is offered to the Universal in the form of the Vital Fire in one’s own being. That the food is offered to the Divine Being within us and that it must be so felt is the central idea of this agnihotra. Hence runs the saying that one must eat in silence, maunena bhoktavyam. Whoever knows how to perform this rite, this offering of food to the Divine Being within us, eats purity itself, takes in strength itself. The Upanishad says that all the sins of such a one are burnt to ashes like the fibrous tuft of a reed thrown into fire.

This is the purity of food that the text speaks of, and it gives in its turn purity of sattva the character of which we have already dealt with at some length.

Now we shall take up the question of smrti-lambha, the acquiring of smrti. By smịti is meant an immediate awareness of what one is seeking, an intuitive reference to the constant presence of the subject meditated upon or the object sought after. In the context, it is the idea of the bhūmā ātman, the Vast Self, that fills or presses upon the mind opening it to the intuition of the presence of the bhūmā; it is this intuition that is acquired by an exalted and purified understanding illumining the whole sattva which, in the language of later scriptures, can very well include svabhāva, nature, or, temperament and qualities and the mind-stuff as well. To extend the connotation of smrti to intuition may not be acceptable to modern scholarship. But some considerations warrant us to fix the sense of the word thiswise. Firstly, śruti and smrti are Vedic terms, the former denotes the inspirational, spiritual audience, the latter intuitive discovery of what has been heard by the mystical subtle hearing. That is why Smrti or Dharma Shastra is supposed to be a discovery of the sense of the śruti which was lost to the direct hearing. Secondly, any other cense will not fit in with the context. A mere remembrance of the traditional doctrine or of the sense of a textual passage does not require such a strong and pure sattva. Nor can sheer memory of that character dispel the many phases of ignorance that the embodied soul is beset with. And when the Upanishad speaks of the knots, the knots are not a product of poetic fancy or a philosophic concept in the sphere of Metaphysics. They are entanglements of subtle nerve-force lodged in a frame of psycho-physical structure which acts on and reacts to the functionings of the nervous system that links the subtler levels and conditions of being to the grosser material body. The smrti, then, is not a mere memory, but an intuition that carries with it a certain dynamism that cuts asunder these knots of ignorance.

The Upanishad proceeds to say that when this intuitive grasp of bhūmā becomes firm and constant, dhruva, there is a release from all the knots, sarvagranthinām vipramokṣaḥ. What are those knots? They represent the desires, passions, attachments and a host of other binding factors by which the embodied being feels chained to the body, life and mind, feels them to be itself and mistakes for its own being the ego, a posing figure of the true Self. These knots form a protective envelope for the radical knot of the ego, covering the true soul, the Purusha. The text says in effect that the acquiring of the constant smrti is an effective means by which these knots of ignorance are loosened and untied leaving the radical ego-knot to be treated by a special means, a means other than the constant and fixed smrti, the intuition, which is not sufficient to cut off the knot in the heart, hrdayagranthi. For, as is elsewhere in the Upanishads stated, the knot in the heart is cut off only by the direct perception of the Supreme, tasmin drsțe parātpare. How is this supreme perception possible — this realisation and consummation ? Now, this question is answered in the latter part of the sentence: “ To such a one Bhagavan Sanatkumara shows the shore beyond Ignorance." Let us pause and consider the implication of this statement, and then proceed to discover clues, if any, that could help us to appreciate the mention of Sanatkumara as the deliverer, who is also called Skanda in this connection.

Here is an implicit declaration that however arduous the Vidya or spiritual discipline that one adopts and follows to a successful end, it cannot itself bring the realisation of the ultimate Truth. One can achieve the purification of the inner instrumental substance through the offering of consecrated food to the Agni, vaišvānara, the Universal Purusha within us and train oneself and learn to feel that it is the Divine Being within that accepts the food as oblation and eats and causes to eat, bhoktā bhojayitā ca bhagavān, as the early Vedantic sadhaka did; one can purify the inner instrument, antaḥ karaņa by the later Vedantic methods of training the sense-contacts to be free from greed, desire, disgust and a host of other disturbing forces of life, as are so impressively discoursed upon in the Gita. By that purity gained, one can open oneself to an intuition in a mind calm or in the high altitudes of exalted thought; by the intuition one can have a constant remembrance of the Most High, the paramam, the Plenum, bhūmā, the Self, ātman. Without effort, so spontaneously can one hold the Idea in the mind that it would be impossible to be without it even for a moment. These are no mean successes in the Sadhana; and they yield notable results too; they dissolve all the elements of bondage, all factors that branch out of the original ignorance, mūla-avidyā, rooted in the heart.

Purity, an intuitive grasp, a fixed and constant memory with all their good results, can go far, but not far enough; they stop short of the highest reach; all the personal exertions in the Sadhana with their fruits do not arrive at the core of realisation, or soar to the highest summit. One can go, with the means at one’s disposal won by Sadhana, deep within towards the innermost apartment of the Self, and knock and knock, but the door of the chamber is still closed; one has to wait and watch until the door opens at the will of the Atman who is the revealer. Nowhere in the Upanishads where instructions of the Sadhanas are given, we find that the realisation is the fruit of the personal effort alone. These disciplines and methods of approach prepare the journey towards the goal and make one fit for the consummation. Even when an exclusive choice is made for realising the Self, it is the Self that reveals its own body to the seeker, tasya eșa ātmā vivrņute tanum svām, and not that the seeker storms the gate and discovers the Self by the merit of his own Sadhana. ¹²⁰

Therefore to one well-equipped with the riches of the Sadhana, strong and steady, prepared in the manner mentioned above or in a like manner for the supreme event, the Deliverer comes with his gift, carries him safe across the ocean of darkness to the other side where reigns the Supreme Effulgence. He comes from beyond the range of the personal self, for his helping hand comes, stretching from outside into the sphere of personal exertion in the Sadhana to crown it ultimately with success, siddhi.

This question remains — why is the Deliverer named Sanatkumara ? There will be no difficulty in understanding the Deliverer to be the Supreme Self, parama ātman, or God, iſa or brahman but instead of any of these being mentioned, a new name new to these scriptures — is sprung upon us, quite abruptly. Added to this interesting name, surprisingly comes Skanda, affirmed to be identical with it. We cannot escape the difficulty by explaining, as the scholiasts have done, that this part of the sentence refers to the fact of the story that it was Sanatkumara who taught Narada and showed him the shore beyond darkness. “To such a one he shows, tasmai darśayati ", clearly points out that it is the general function of Sanatkumara; nor can we dismiss the problem holding, as modern scholarship in the West with its Indian following has done, that Skanda Sanatkumara is a later addition to the text. The Chhandogya Brahmana of which this Upanishad forms a part is still chanted by the priests of the Sama Veda branch and this passage is included in the chanting; the commentators do mention the passage; these two factors are enough for us to assume that it forms part of the genuine text as handed down by teacher to pupil since the days of the Brahmana.

We shall keep aside the question of Skanda for the moment and make an attempt to know of Sanatkumara. The commentaries on the text are not in any way helpful to let us know the relevancy of introducing Sanatkumara at the close of the sādhanā which, as we have seen, is compressed in the brief passage we have taken up for clarification. But we are not utterly helpless in the matter. Shankara, in the introduction to his commentary on Sanatsujātiya announces that Sanatkumara of the Chhandogya Upanishad is the same as Sanatsujata, the Divine sage. In his discourse on spiritual truths addressed to Dhritarashtra, Vidura comes to a stage when he invokes, by Yoga-power, the presence of Sanatkumara and implores him to give the necessary instruction. "Yogabalana āhūya” is a significant phrase; for it shows that Sanatkumara the Divine sage has his abode elsewhere and is not a terrestrial Being. Where is his abode? What precisely is the sense of the word Sanatsujata? Let us hear what the commentary says:¹²¹ “sanat means sanātana, the Eternal, brahma called hiranyagarbha; from that Eternal Brahma’s mind is born excellently, with knowledge and dispassion etc., the blessed Sanatkumara, who is therefore called Sanatsujata.”

These lines throw light on the origin and character of Sanatkumara. We gather that Sanatkumara is called Sanatsujata because of the knowledge, dispassion and other divine qualities with which he was born; that these qualities have been there from his very birth and are natural to his being because he is an issue from Brahman, the Eternal; that he does not spring from para brahman, the parātpara, the Absolute beyond the All, but from brahman as hiranyagarbha, the Creator from the summit of the Cosmos of which our terrestrial existence is the pedestal at this end; that therefore the body of the Son of ntranyagarbha brahma is made of the Divine substance of the Creative Godhead, and his natural abode is an abode in a plane of existence whence he can carry on the functions ich he was fitted by the special features that characterised him from his very birth.

In the light of the story in the Mahabharata that Vidura made a special request to Sanatkumara to come, and the latter responded to the call because the call reached him and was made through the force of Yoga, and in the face of the statement in the Chhandogya Upanishad that Sanatkumara shows the shore of ignorance and sorrow to one who is pure and strong and steady in his nature and substance of being, there is no difficulty in drawing the conclusion that in the scheme of this Cosmic existence it is the special function of the Son of the Creator, Sanatkumara, to dispel the darkness covering the clouded human souls and reach them to the regions of Light where is no distress, suffering or death.

We may note in passing that it will be a mistake to suppose that Sanatkumara or any other God or gods mentioned in the scriptures, are nothing but different names of the One God and that in reality these gods are not distinct beings with specific purposes, but are just formulations by wise men to meet the requirements of different temperaments. This supposition is quite common among modern minds which ignore the fact that Matter, or the physical Universe for that matter, is not the sole existence and that in its creation, or formation it is preceded, penetrated, sustained and directed by forces subtler and higher than we can normally conceive of. It is true that these forces can be traced to the One source and support of all existences; but they do emanate from an Intelligence or intelligent Being in the high levels of existence, themselves behaving and functioning as limbs of the Supreme Being, sa ātmā, angani anya-devatāḥ. Ultimately, we can say that all gods are but One God; why, we can easily admit that all existences, manifestations, beings, men or gods and all that is, is not, sat ca asat ca, is the God, the Sole Reality. But that does not nullify the practical truth of the difference in created beings or gods or their functionings. We may take an instance from modern thought. Nature is a scientific unit; advanced scientific thought, let us say, the Theory of Relativity has reduced a piece of matter to a system of events, so much so that it is no longer regarded as a stuff of the world; and the hypothesis that the “physical ” and the “mental ” are essentially similar or one is becoming possible. Well, does all this negative the practical truth of the structures and functionings of the innumerable organisms and forces, energies, heat, light, electricity and the rest?

The Gods, then are distinct Beings with their special functions; they may bear different names in different climes or ages. The Rig Veda speaks of Agni, the Divine Fire, as the youngest of the Gods; he is the Divine Child, kumāra; his functions vary with the planes or levels of being; in the high levels of this Cosmic existence where is his own home, the Home also of the Gods, he leads the army of Gods to fight the Asuras. In the Purana he is called skanda, kumāra devasenāni, leader of the army of the Gods. When he vanquishes the chief of the Asuras, the Asura called sūra is slain by his weapon called Shakti and changes into a peacock to become a fit vehicle, vāhana, of his Divine slayer. We need not enter into the details of these symbolisms used in the later Puranas; nor is it necessary to reconcile every detail in the Puranas with what we find in the Rig Veda or Mahabharata. It is enough for our purpose to note the significance of identifying Skanda with Sanatkumara. The Upanishad has not spoken of the fight that the spiritual seeker has to put up against the forces of evil that obstruct his journey towards the Truth, Light, Immortality. The mention of Skanda, the Warrior-God, as identical with Sanatkumara suggests the battle that the blessed Son of the Great God has to give to the Asuric beings and forces for the spiritual uplift of man, before he could bring under control and conquer and slay utterly or transform them wherever possible, as has been shown in the episode of sūrapadmăsura becoming the subdued and transformed cock for Kumara to ride on acclaiming the victory of the Gods.

Whatever the symbols employed to convey the idea, one fact remains and that is the gist of the text that we have considered at some length. However high and arduous and assured the Sadhana be, however steadfast and strong and pure in mind and heart the sadhaka be, whatever notable results be found and noted on the road, however liberal, independent, self-willed and unaided by any source of strength and light the seeker be, however certain the result may seem, the result itself, the final goal, the consummation comes from outside the bounded sphere of the personal self of the sadhaka, from the Deliverer, apparently as the fruit of the labour, or independently of it as a matter of Grace. Or, in the spirit of Universalism of the Vedic and Vedantic seers we may state that when spiritual disciplines yield nourishment to the whole man influencing him in his conduct in the inner and outer life and as a consequence he is firm and strong and constant in his call to the Divine Being that rules over his Destiny in his sojourn on earth, then a Grace, a special Grace of the Divine responds and functions through the Commander of the fighting army of Gods, who is called variously,—Agni in his original abode, Sanatkumara a mental offspring of the creator hiranyagarbha, brahmamānasaputra, or Kumara the boy, an issue of the Effulgence of Shiva — and “him they call Skanda, yea, they call him Skanda.”