5. Kumārila’s Second Account of Liberation

The second account, to which we turn presently, is an account of liberation which is not quite that. As I already noted, the question in virtue of which the two accounts are about the same thing concerns not precisely liberation, but generally the nature of the knowledge of the Self in the Veda and specifically its use in the pursuit of liberation or other goals. In fact, Kumārila in the Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya 1.3.29 does not talk about mokṣa, kaivalya, apavarga at all, but about niḥśreyasa and its paired counterpart abhyudaya. This is an important point, for two reasons. First, niḥśreyasa, as I noted in the introduction, was a term commonly used for liberation in Indian intellectual history, but not exclusively so. As an axiological term, referring to “that good which has no higher to itself,” it could and did stand for any good one might have considered the highest, and we saw that the Vasiṣṭha Dharma-Sūtra and Śabara used it for heaven. Second, because of being a value term, niḥśreyasa connoted a commitment to the designated good, a commitment not necessarily expressed by the negative terms. We also saw that the Kumārila’s Śloka-Vārttika account was inserted in a course of refutation of competing ideologies, and McCrea had alerted us that Kumārila’s endorsement of liberation seemed quite provisional. It is difficult, however, to talk about the highest good without some commitment to it.

Before we can appreciate fully Kumārila’s reasoning in the Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya, we need to acquaint ourselves with the ideology to which the account is tied. Here knowledge of the Self is not associated to Sāṅkhya and similar doctrines, which wanted liberation to follow just from understanding that the Self is different from the body, but to chapter eight of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, which talks about knowledge of the Self as a means of fulfilling desires. The chapter consists of two parts which are related in structure: both begin with an injunction which says that the Self should be investigated; the first part talks about various worlds and desires that one may win and fulfill by knowing the Self; the second part is story about Prajāpati teaching the gods and the titans whose purpose is to illustrate how this investigation of the Self might proceed; both parts talk about what may be described as the final attainment accomplished by means of knowledge of the Self.

For our purposes, it is not necessary to penetrate fully the logic of the chapter, but we need to note a couple of things. First, the injunction runs: “One should investigate, clearly understand the Self that is free from faults, ageless and immortal, free from sorrow, not liable to hunger and thirst, the Self whose desires and intentions are true. He who investigates and understands this Self obtains all the worlds, and all his desires are fulfilled.”^[1]

Second, the results which are promised to follow from knowledge of the Self in the injunction indicate immediately that the Upaniṣad is not interested in knowledge of the Self as such, but as a means of fulfilling desires and winning the heavenly spheres. It also quickly becomes obvious that the “true” desires and intentions from the injunction are not desires and intentions for the Self, as we may be prone to think due to long acquaintance with readings of the Upaniṣads through the lens of Advaita Vedānta;^[2] they are desires and intentions which, through knowledge of the Self, become immediately fulfilled and realized. These are the same familiar desires for the heavenly world of ancestors containing the common choice delights, but the issue is how to obtain freedom of motion to visit them at will, without depending on the exigencies of ritual action.^[3] And then, there is the familiar concern with re-death: how does one make sure that the highest heaven which one may obtain is not a result that will eventually perish? “[A]s here in this world the possession of a territory won by action comes to an end, so in the hereafter a world won by merit comes to an end.”^[4] In other words, the Vedic worldview of desires which we discussed in the previous chapter and in the Introduction is not under question, but is affirmed throughout. The pressing concern is not how to get free from desires, but how to make sure they are not thwarted.

The chapter also presents what may be called the highest attainment, referred to as “the highest light” (paraṃ jyotiḥ) and associated with the world of Brahman (brahma-loka), described very graphically: it is the third heaven from here, having two seas, Ara and Ṇya, a lake by the name of Airaṃmadīya, a banyan tree known as Somasavana, a fort called Aparājita and Brahman’s golden hall by the name of Prabhu.^[5] There is a path leading to it that goes from the human heart, where the Self resides, through one of the channels issuing from it—the central one leading to the top of the head—and the sun rays which form a continuum with these channels and culminate in the sun itself: the door of heaven. This is the stairway to the heaven of Brahman, and the password at the door is Om.^[6] This highest attainment is a place from which one does not return again to this “gray and toothless state, to the toothless, gray and slobbery state.”^[7] Attaining the world of Brahman presupposes liberation: “Shaking off evil, like a horse its hair, and freeing myself, like the moon from Rāhu’s jaws, I, the perfected self (ātman), cast off the body, the imperfect, and attain the world of brahman.”^[8]

Wining this highest attainment is absolutely predicated on knowing the true Self, and a crucial role is played by the character of the Self in deep sleep, a common Upaniṣadic theme which presents the Self as persisting but remaining in a state of non-transitive awareness, not liable to the faults of waking and dream. This is a crucial role, because here the state of the Self in deep sleep is a border state, a state in which the Self maintains its existence but is not liable to faults, death, old age, grief, hunger and thirst, simply by not being aware of its identities in waking and dream.^[9] However, it is a border that has to be crossed too, because there the Self “does not perceive itself fully as 'I am this,'... It has become completely annihilated.”^[10] One, in other words, has to reach this state of the Self in deep sleep because it is a state of full separation from the body, but then one has to re-emerge in a positive situation of one’s “own true form,” svena rūpeṇa.^[11] This true form is one in which the Self is no longer embodied, but keeps the innate faculties of sight, smell, speech, hearing, thought, which function through its innate mind, its “divine sight.”^[12] These have, obviously, been suspended in the state of deep sleep, in virtue of which disembodiment and freedom from all faults is attained, but once that happens, they re-emerge to function autonomously, without their bodily seats.

This state of the Self, “the highest person” (uttama-puruṣa) which is disembodied but positive—“like the wind, rain-cloud, lightning and thunder”—goes on to enjoy in the world of Brahman “with women, chariots and relatives,”^[13] with all desires fulfilled and all worlds won.

Back to Kumārila now, we should remember that dharma as a means of some good was for the most part restricted to the central ritual action, because it was the ritual action which ultimately brings the desired good. This made the ritual action puruṣārtha, subservient to the purpose of man, while all else in the sacrifice was deemed kratvartha, subservient to the purpose of the ritual itself. There was, however, a scenario under which a ritual meant for a particular result could also bring an added value, if instead of a standard ritual item a substitute was used. Take, for instance, the daily Agnihotra ritual, an offering of milk into the sacrificial fire, which, as we saw above, was classified as an obligatory ritual whose purpose was to prevent the creation of bad karma. Now, if the sacrificer were to offer yoghurt instead of milk, this change would transform the nature of the sacrifice from obligatory to optional, and the sacrifice would not only prevent bad karma as its common result, but would also bring heaven as an added value.

Two points are important to note here. First, what brings about the change in the nature of a sacrifice from nitya to kāmya is the desire on the part of the sacrificer: the sacrificer is prompted by the desire for heaven to use yoghurt instead of milk. Second, yoghurt which, being a substance, is naturally subservient to the ritual, undergoes trans-instrumentalization and becomes subservient to the purpose of man (puruṣārtha), the element which brings about the desired value, all the while remaining subservient to the ritual in other sacrifices. By this principle, yoghurt could be theorized both as kratvartha and puruṣārtha. It would remain subservient to the central ritual action of offering in general, but it would maintain autonomy where there is an injunction which establishes a direct causal relation between it and, say, heaven, through an appropriate desire. This trans-instrumentalization would not work if the statement which says that the use of yoghurt brings particular results belongs to a context of another sacrifice where yoghurt is a common offertory, in which case the statement of results relating to its offering would have to be interpreted as arthavāda advertising the ritual. For our purposes, we ought to note well again that a category cannot be puruṣārtha without there being a desire for a specific result on the part of the agent.^[14]

Kumārila applies this principle over the knowledge of the Self to theorize how it can both be kratvartha and puruṣārtha. We saw in the previous chapter and in Kumārila’s first account of liberation that the knowledge of the Self from the Upaniṣads served as an impetus for taking up ritual action, as well as the principle which secures the relation between engagement and disengagement in actions and the future results which they bring: there is a permanent Self in which the ritual continues to exist and mature until blossoming in heaven.^[15] This was no mean role to play, since without such knowledge a ritual would not happen: An intelligent person will not do an action unless s/he knows that such action is for her good. Nevertheless, such knowledge was subordinate to the ritual, and it was not the element which directly procures the expected human good. But, imagine a scenario in which knowing the Self as different from the body is: (1) enjoined by a Vedic injunction; (2) associated with attainments of the kind which dharma brings in general; (3) which attainments are related to specific human desires; and (4) such knowing cannot in any straightforward manner be related to another ritual through the context. Under such a scenario, knowledge of the Self would undergo trans-instrumentalization in the manner of yoghurt and it would become a direct means of achieving a specific desired human good, puruṣārtha.

Precisely such a scenario is in play in the eighth prapāṭhaka of the Chandogya Upaniṣad that we touched upon above. First, there is an injunction that the Self should be investigated and known distinctly. Second, there are specific results of the kind which dharma produces that are accomplished by this knowledge, which, as I said above, Kumārila classified under the two groups of abhyudaya and niḥśreyasa. Kumārila defines abhyudaya here as the obtaining of supernatural powers of the kind produced by the practice of Yoga, such as the ability to become atomic in size.^[16] In the context of chapters seven and eight of the Chāndogya this clearly refers to the freedom of motion (kāma-cāra) and the ability to visit the heavenly spheres.^[17] Niḥśreyasa, on the other hand, standing for the highest good, is defined as “a result which is a state of attaining the supreme Self, a state consisting in no-return.”^[18] Kumārila does not say what the “supreme Self” or paramātman refers to here, but it likely is a gloss of the paraṃ jyotiḥ or “the highest light” from the Chāndogya, or perhaps the “highest person,” uttama-puruṣa, the last and highest state of the Self attained after it had emerged from deep sleep and attained the world of Brahman, with its cognitive powers restored, unembodied but “in its own form.” As we shall see later, by his time the two were in any case seen as related.

Third, these two attainments got through knowledge of the Self are clearly related to desires, and Kumārila explicitly treats them as a pair: the attainments consist in fulfilling desires, and the two form sentential supplements to the injunction for knowing the Self. Finally, it is not possible unambiguously to relate these attainments through context to some other ritual in which knowledge of the Self would be serving the purpose of the ritual (kratvartha), and therefore they cannot be explained away as being arthavāda.^[19] From all of this it must follow that the results in the form of abhyudaya and niḥśreyasa are real, and that knowledge of the Self as the thing enjoined for their achieving is puruṣārtha. Knowledge of the Self has, thus, become a crucial item for achieving prosperity and liberation, joining a select club consisting of yoghurt, the wooden ladle, the milking vessel, the post made of khadira wood. We can almost visualize how scandalized Śaṅkara must have been by this.

Just as in the first account, the attainment of liberation which is related to the injunctions of knowledge of the Self must be accompanied by the performance of the rituals and actions obligatory for all classes in general or respectively. The two are meant for accomplishing different results in this pursuit: action exhausts previous bad karma and prevents the creation of new karma, and knowledge of the Self brings abhyudaya and niḥśreyasa. Since they both produce results independently of one another, serve different purposes and proceed through different courses, they are not mutually optional, exclusive, or subordinate to one another.^[20] Since they both contribute to liberation as the final result, we may venture that Kumārila saw their relationship akin to that of two or more equally principal, apūrva-producing actions in the complex sacrifices such as the Darśa-pūrṇamāsa which we discussed in the previous chapter.

This is rather an important point, because this second scenario of Kumārila does amount to a form of what has been theorized as a combination of knowledge and action as both exercising causal efficacy in the pursuit of liberation (jñāna-karma-samuccaya). Ideally this was a combination between two independent and principal causal elements, pradhāna, but it was also understood as a relationship between a primary means and its direct subordinate, if the subordinate remained causally efficacious.^[21] What Kumārila presented in the Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya amounts to a combination of action and knowledge as mutually independent (and therefore equally principal) means in the attainment of liberation.

We will continue with Kumārila for a tad longer in the concluding remarks, but let us finish this section by reemphasizing that what makes the two accounts so different is the absence of desires in the first and their presence in the second. McCrea had suggested that Kumārila did change his ideas about the role of the knowledge of the Self from the Kumārila’s Śloka-Vārttika to the Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya, in virtue of which his understanding of liberation also must have changed, and he traced this change to a better grasp of pre-existing Mīmāṃsā rules of interpretation. However, it is quite evident that Kumārila was aware of this specific rule—how a thing can serve both the need of the ritual and the need of man—already in the Kumārila’s Śloka-Vārttika, and it was precisely in consideration of this rule that he extended the definition of dharma as a means of some good from the limited scope of action to offertories and ritual details as well. I find it preferable, therefore, to suggest that he was acting in the role of a hermeneut to accommodate two very different accounts of liberation, both of which had currency in the Vedic theology of his time. We will touch upon this question in the conclusion of this part of the dissertation.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

ya ātmāpahata-pāpmā vijaro vimṛtyur viśoko vijighatso 'pipāsaḥ satya-kāmaḥ satya-saṅkalpaḥ so 'nveṣṭavyaḥ sa vijijñāsitavyaḥ. sa sarvāṃś ca lokān āpnoti sarvāṃś ca kāmān yas tam ātmānam anuvidya vijānāti. This is the version of the injunction which opens the second part of the chapter. The first version, right at the beginning of the chapter, runs: “Now, here in this fort of brahman there is a small lotus, a dwelling place, and within it, a small space. In that space there is something—and that’s what you should try to investigate, that’s what you should try to know distinctly.” Translation Olivelle, with a slight modification.

[2]:

Cf. for instance Deussen 1980:190: “These ‘true wishes’ are here delineated in a rather odd, clumsy manner. … This subsection [8.2] from its spirit and tone, stands off so much from the whole and interrupts and disturbs the whole context … that we conjecture in it a perceptible delineation of ideas [8.]3.2 by another hand … perhaps by the same hand which, at the conclusion of the previous chapter (Prapāṭhaka), explained the fulfillment of all things in the sense of a magical unfoldment of the person into many manifold individuals.”

[3]:

See 8.2. The worlds attained by discovering the Self include those of the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, perfumes and garlands, food and drink, music and women. “[T]hose here in this world who depart after discovering the self and these real desires obtain complete freedom of movement in all the worlds (8.1.8).” “Anyone who knows this goes to the heavenly world every day (8.3.5).” Olivelle’s translation.

[4]:

8.1.6, Olivelle’s translation.

[5]:

8.3.4; 8.4.3; 8.5.3; 8.12.2-5; 8.13.

[6]:

8.6.

[7]:

8.14-15.

[8]:

8.13.1: aśva iva romāṇi vidhūya papaṃ candra iva rāhor mukhāt pramucya dhūtvā śarīram akṛtaṃ kṛtātmā brahma-lokam abhisaṃbhavāmīty abhisaṃbhavāmīti. Olivelle’s translation.

[9]:

That this is a crucial state is quite evident from 8.6.3: “So, when someone is sound asleep here, totally collected and serene, and sees no dreams, he has slipped into these veins. No evil thing can touch him, for he is then linked with radiance.” Olivelle’s translation.

[10]:

8.12.

[11]:

8.3.4; 8.12.3

[12]:

8.12.4-5.

[13]:

8.12.2-3.

[14]:

This is worked out at the beginning of the third pāda of the fourth adhyāya of Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra attributed to Jaimini, where particularly important are sūtra 1, which states the general principle that statements about results associated with substances are arthavāda, and sūtra 5, which states the exception. Some useful information on this can be gleaned from Yoshimizu 2004.

[15]:

“Because, without it (knowledge of the Self) there would be no relation to engagement or disengagement in actions which bring results in the hereafter.” tena vinā paraloka-phaleṣu karmasu pravṛtti-nivṛtty-asambandhāt. Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya 1.3.29, I.288.

[16]:

yoga-janyāṇimādy-aṣṭa-guṇaiśvarya-phalāni varṇitāni, Ibid.

[17]:

From the seventh chapter he cites 7.1.3, tarati śokam ātmavit, and from the eight 8.2 and 8.7.1, both of which talk about attaining all worlds, fulfilling all desires of the heavenly kind.

[18]:

apunar-āvṛtty-ātmaka-paramātma-prāpty-avasthā-phala-vacanam. Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya 1.3.29, I.288.

[19]:

“Since an unambiguous connection or disconnection to some ritual cannot be established through their forming a part of some context, these statements about results are not arthavāda like those about the ointment, the khādira wood, the sruva etc.” aprakaraṇa-gatatvenānaikāntika-kratu-sambandhāsambandhāc ca nāñjana-khādira-sruva-vākyādi-phala-śruti-vad arthavādatvam. Ibid.

[20]:

“And, the injunction of knowledge does not preclude a relation to action. The obligatory and optional actions, relating to the different classes and āśramas, have to be performed for the purpose of exhausting previous sins and the prevention of future sin on the account of their non-performance. Because these [knowledge on the Self one hand and action of the two types on the other] have different purposes and proceed through different paths, they do not cancel one another, become options or subordinate parts to one another.” na ca jñāna-vidhānena karma-sambandha-vāraṇam. praty-āśrama-varṇa-niyatāni nitya-naimittika-karmāṇy api pūrva-kṛta-durita-kṣayārtham akaraṇa-nimittānāgata-pratyavāya-parihārārthaṃ ca kartavyāni. na ca teṣāṃ bhinna-prayojanatvād bhinna-mārgatvāc ca bādha-vikalpa-parasparāṅgāṅgi-bhāvāḥ sambhavanti. Ibid.

[21]:

Samuccaya in the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra attributed to Jaimini and Śabara thereon seems to refer to combining things without any relationship of subordination, and surely such is the sense in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.58, which says that meditations which bring different results may be combined indiscriminately, since they produce their own results independently. Advaitins have understood the relationship in broader terms, as is evident, for instance, from the first chapter of Sureśvara’s Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi