Conclusion to Second Part

I said that Kumārila’s two accounts of liberation need not be interpreted as a change in his own understanding, but that it is better to see them rather as an attempt to accommodate two very different understandings of both what liberation is and how it can be achieved. As we saw, his first account was tied to “Sāṅkhya,” and we have reasons to believe that this was the systematic Sāṅkhya which was organized around treatises such as the Sāṅkhya-Kārikā: the same arguments against it reappear in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa commentaries. However, Kumārila’s account had wider application and it could refer to any variation of the doctrine that discriminative knowledge—knowledge of the Self as distinct from matter—is in itself sufficient for liberation.

And, at this point it would be useful, it seems to me, to think of the famous Sāṅkhya-Yoga distinction in the Bhagavad-Gītā, where Sāṅkhya is introduced by Kṛṣṇa in the second chapter just before the beginning of the fratricidal war, precisely in the sense of knowing the true Self as different from the body, not an agent nor a patient of action, neither a murderer nor liable to murder. Throughout the Gītā this Sāṅkhya is affirmed as a means of liberation, alternative to Yoga, to yield the same results as Yoga but inherently more difficult. We also saw that the result which discriminative knowledge of the Self was supposed to bring was isolation of the cognitive agent and absence of transitive awareness.

One problem with Sāṅkhya for Vedic theology could have been that it is not easy to comprehend how discriminative knowledge can be a means that is constitutionally processual. How does one practice knowing to be a Self which is different from the body? It also seems fair to me to say that the texts that promote such knowledge rarely make it clear what is knowledge as knowledge, as a result—knowledge as content of awareness that has the quality of certainty—and what is knowledge as practice, a procedure to arrive at certainty.

Another problem must have been that an isolated Self with no transitive awareness for all eternity cannot be appealing to theologians who have spent their lives pondering over how rice, milk, and wood, when arranged properly, can bring about eternal and unsurpassed happiness. When early Vedic theology—both Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta—encountered “Sāṅkhya” in this sense of discriminative knowledge, it treated it as information that one can do things with, use it in one way or another for one or another result, in the same manner as the repurposing of yoghurt or khādira wood.

Kumārila, however, had committed himself to claiming that both dharma and mokṣa were solely in the province of the Veda, so in his first account he tried to accommodate a theory of liberation that had taken hold in the Vedic worldview but was not quite to his liking. He did not share its presuppositions, but he could work something out. So, what he did in the end amounted to turning Sāṅkhya into a form of niṣkāma-karma-yoga, where the information about an eternal Self had engendered disinterest in the attainments promised in the Veda, but ritual practice was repurposed for attaining liberation.

Kumārila’s second account, on the other hand, should be grouped with the Brahma-Sūtra doctrine of liberation, with which it shared all important notions. This doctrine was centered on the role of meditation. Liberation was to be achieved by meditative absorption in Brahman as one’s Self—the higher Self that is not liable to transmigration, and not by any form of intellectual understanding or knowledge qua knowledge. Meditation on Brahman was the means of liberation even for Vedāntins who were much closer ontologically to Śaṅkara, such as Bhartṛprapañca, Maṇḍana Miśra, and the prasaṅkhyāna-vādins, which distinguished mediate knowing through scriptural cognition and direct knowing through meditative absorption. In the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, knowing as knowing was largely procedural, insofar as it was important for forming the meditation or ascertaining the meditational counterpart of oneself, in just the way that sacrifices are formulated: the process of liberation was meditation. In the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna, on the other hand, the veridical cognition of Brahman or the Self obtained from the Upaniṣads was genuinely important, but even then, liberation did not follow by knowing Brahman or understanding with full certainty what the Upaniṣads say: there was no liberation without meditation on Brahman. This summarizes my overall argument in chapters three through five: in pre-Śaṅkara Vedic theology, liberation was never a result just of knowing as knowing, whether that be the discriminating knowledge of the Self or knowledge of Brahman from the Upaniṣads. Liberation was a result either of ritual or meditation on Brahman.

Persistent throughout the chapter was the role of ritual. We saw that Vedic theologians were not quite sure what the role of ritual in the pursuit of liberation was. For Mīmāṃsakas, it was supposed to prevent the creation of bad karma, but Kumārila thought it could also exhaust some of the old karmic stock. In his first account ritual was, really, the sole means. The Brahma-Sūtra turned the table on Mīmāṃsā: ritual’s primary role was to nurture meditation, but it was also mandatory for those who do not pursue liberation. Bhartṛprapañca, coming from the background of the therapeutic paradigm where ignorance caused agency and ritual perpetuated it, promoted ritual from an assistant to meditation to an equal partner.

The role of desire, kāma, was another item of negotiation. Kumārila’s first account was predicated on the absence of desire for the common Vedic attainments, but his second account clearly presupposed it. In the related Brahma-Sūtra account the desires related to the Vedic attainments became essential characteristics of Brahman, accomplished by Brahman’s mere will, and to strive after fashioning oneself in Brahman’s image meant securing the accomplishment of these desires. The pursuit of liberation became ātma-kāma, and these true desires of Brahman were upheld even by the likes of Bhartṛprapañca, who was, at the end of the day, a monist.

Finally, the idea of liberation was development not only of mokṣa, but equally if not more so of svarga. In fact, the definition of niḥśreyasa as unexcelled felicity, niratiśaya-prīti or niratiśayānanda, placed svarga and mokṣa in the same category, that of the ultimate human attainment. Bliss was, of course, different thing to different theologians, but so was heaven.

Particularly in the early Vedānta that was focused on the Brahma-Sūtra, liberation was much closer to heaven than to the liberation in the schools of the therapeutic paradigm. To quote Nakamura, it was “almost unparalleled in the writings of any Indian school.”^[1] The “big discovery” of the Upaniṣads was that one could attain and keep the attainments that the ritualists aspired for, if one could just tap into their incorruptible source, Brahman, which is free from faults and whose desires and resolves are ever true.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Nakamura 1983:531.