Īśvara or God

In Śaṅkara’s philosophy Īśvara or God has an important place. According to Śaṅkara God can be conceived from two different points of view. That are vyāvahārika or empirical and paramārthika or trancendental^[1]. In ordinary practical stand point, vyāvahārika dṛsti, by which the world is belived to be real; God may be God, may be regarded as the cause, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer of the world and therefore, also as an omnipotent and omniscient being. He then appears as possessed of all the qualities (saguṇa) God in the aspect is called saguṇa Brahma or Īśvara in Śaṅkara’s philosophy. He is the object of worship.

But the world is conceived by Śaṅkara as an appearance which rests on our ignorance. Description of God as the creator of the world is true only from the practical point of view, so long as the world appearance is regarded as real. Creatorship of the world is not God’s essence (svarūpalakṣana) and does not touch His essence. In this context the distinction that Śaṅkara wants to make can be easily understood by an example of shephered who plays a role of king, wages war, conquers a country and rules it. Here the description of the actor as a shepherd gives what he is from the real point of view. It is an essential description of him (svarūpalakṣana) but the description of him as a King, ruler and conqueror is applied to him only from the point of view of the stage and his role there, it is merely description of what is accidental to the person (tatasta-lakṣana) and does not touch his essence.

Śaṅkara’s description of God as conscious, real, infinite is an attempt to describe His essence (svarūpa) where as the descripton of Him as the creator, sustainer and destroyer of the world or by any other characteristic connected with the world, is a mere accidental description and it holds good only from the empirical point of view of the world (vyavahārikadṛsti).^[2] This is like the actor on the stage from the point of view other than that of the stage, so we can look at God also from a non-wordly point of view (pāramārthikadrṣṭi) and try to associate God in the aspect of what He really is, without any reference to the world, is called by Śaṅkara “parabrahma” or the supreme God. For understanding this higher aspect of God as He is really in Him self (without relation to the world); along with the lower aspect, Śaṅkara constantly draws on the anology of the magician (māyavi) as suggested in the Svetāsvetāra. As magician is a juggler only to those who are effected by his trick but to those few who are uneffected and have no illusion, the magician fails to be a juggler.

Though God as creator is only apparent, yet his importance and value should not be ignored. It is only through the lower standpoint that we can gradually mount up to the higher. Advaita Vedanta like Upaniṣads, believes in gradual relation of truth in stages through which spiritual progress takes place. An ordinary man who regards the world as a self-sufficient reality feels no urge to look beyond it and search for its cause and ground. When comes to realise the insufficiency of the world and looks for something which sustains the world from behind, he comes to discover God as a creator or sustainer of the world. He feels admiration and reverence and begins to pray to the creator. God thus becomes the object of worship with the further advance of thought, one may discover that God whom he reached through the world is really the only reality, the world is only an appearance. Thus at the first level the world alone is real, at the second the world and God at the last, only God. The first is atheism. The second represents Theism and the last is the absolute monism of Śaṅkara and can be reached gradually through the second. He therefore believes the utility of God (as Saguna brahma) as it purifies the heart and prepares one for gradually reaching the highest goal (God). Śaṅkara gives a place even to the worship of many deities because it redeems the spirituality backwords at last from utter theism and, it serves as a stage on the way to the highest truth.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Śaṅkarācārya, Brahmasūtrabhāṣyam, Madras: Samata Books,1983, I.1.12

[2]:

George Victor, Life and Teachings of Adi Sankaracharya, New Delhi: D.K. Print world (P) Ltd, 2002, p.120