Viswarupa

BY S. V. RAMAMURTY, I.C.S.

There is a conflict in man between the multiplicity which he sees all round him and the unity in which he is taught by instinct and tradition to believe. Man has a body which is separate from other bodies and other things round him. That in him which sees the world around sees itself as separate from everything else in that world. The recognition of his separate self is fundamental in his experience and thought. Round him too he sees pieces of matter, each with its own separate existence and retaining its individuality apart from that of others. Both he and the world are a vast mass of multiplicity. And yet, from the beginning, man has glimpses of a unity in the universe which, first expressed in crude forms, is later rationalised into the conception of God. Most civilised men have a belief in God whom they do not see, dominating their life along with a belief in the world that they do see. This conflict between the seen and the unseen makes for man a problem which he is ever called upon to solve.

This problem is not merely academic. It has a pressing practical significance. It affects man’s understanding, his feeling, his conduct and the urge to integrate his vision. If the world were an aggregate of unrelated entities, man feels small and lonely among existences larger and more powerful than himself. As an animal, he is weak. His intellectual powers find it a struggle to cope with the vast forces of nature. He is bound to a planet which is a speck in the world of stars. His life is short. His death is certain. His best intentions and efforts are often rendered nugatory by causes of which he is ignorant. He has a record of progress in which he can take some pride. But he does so as a poor man hugging his poverty in a world of unfathomable abysses and gigantic achievements. If man were not of the texture of the universe, if the universe were not the result of a guiding intelligence which maintains it in order and, when need be, destroys it, man feels no joyous and sustained urge to live and strive.

Thus man has sought to correct his sense of separateness by a greater or less belief in his kinship with men and things around him. From masses of apparently unrelated happenings, he has been observing uniformities which he enumerates as laws. These laws which agree with his reason give him a sense of extended being, to enable him more and more to feel himself at one with the world around him. Such a union through understanding is the path of Gnana Yoga.

Again, he sees the world as an expression of powers with whom he feels at one by yielding them emotional allegiance. This way of union with the world is the path of Bhakti Yoga. Then again, and more commonly, man senses the right lines of conduct towards beings who are akin to one’s self, and follows them in spite of promptings to the contrary from one’s separate self. Feelings of love, charity, kindliness, duty, sacrifice are woven into a roll of practical life which trails the path of Karma Yoga.

Lastly, there have been men who view the vision of unity to be as real as the vision of multiplicity, both derived from instruments, whether bodily or mental or spiritual, with which one is endowed, and have sought to harmonise the conflicting visions by proper exercise of the instruments. This way of reconciling multiplicity and unity is the path of Raja Yoga.

These forms of Yoga are subjective. Followed by a nation, they yield civilisation. Followed by man, they yield salvation.

Objectively, the body of knowledge that is based on the vision of multiplicity is science, and that which is based on the vision of unity is religion. In their origins, they are apart from each other. But they are not opposed to each other, because they move towards each other. Science has its basis in man’s perception of the multiplicity of differences all round him. It is the systematisation of the vision of all observers, of the motion of all bodies. But the goal of this effort is towards unity. Science tries to reduce the doings of men and things to fewer and fewer laws. If science could systematize all knowledge of the objective world into one law, that one law which stands for the unity of the world would indeed be an expression of God. On the other hand, the perception of unity which is the basis of religion is only a starting point for a body of thought and feeling and conduct which should be adopted as right by the followers of a religion. Sometimes by a priori reasoning, sometimes by the test of racial experience, these lines of right life in practice are evolved and set before its followers by the leaders of each religion. Science and religion both seek the union of multiplicity and unity, but they start from opposite ends. The way between multiplicity and unity is long and difficult. It is perhaps to be expected that, for all except the hardiest spirits, science tends to believe primarily in multiplicity, and to believe in unity only so far as the multiplicity of observers can see. So too in religion, the perceiver of unity tends to be obscured in his vision of multiplicity. The way to rectify science is more science, and religion more religion. Each is the other when completed. Incomplete, they are subject to dangerous short-circuiting.

In order to avoid the partial vision of science and religion, there is need to resort to the method of philosophy and to study the material regarding multiplicity and unity, which both science and religion have gathered. There is a wide range of multiplicity–the multiplicity of existences, of categories, of qualities. Science has introduced order in the multiplicity of existences by arranging them in a four-dimensional frame of space-time. It views matter as kinks in space-time. It is doubtful about the position of life and mind in relation to this. It has hypotheses under examination about the relation of electricity and motion to matter and space-time. It has reduced happenings to a fairly compact body of laws–the laws of gravitation, electrical force, heat and so forth. Physical qualities have been related to the physical entities. But the position of moral values is left undetermined in the search for unity of knowledge. Thus science is an unfinished structure, being built more and more by the devoted labours of men who stand firmly on the ground and do not seek to reach the sky if they must thereby leave their foot-hold.

Religion holds firmly to its belief in the one reality of the. Universe–God. Sometimes, this unity is viewed as of the texture of the universe in the shape of an immanent God. Sometimes, the unity is achieved not by comprehending the differences but by abolishing them, with the result that God transcends the world. Where science affirms mulitiplicity and declines to consider the unity which it has not perceived, there is no ground for a reconciliation between science and religion. Where religion affirms God and denies the world, there too is no immediate scope for such a reconciliation. Reconciliation is possible between science which, while affirming what it sees does not deny what it does not physically see and religion which, while affirming God, affirms also the world of multiplicity. The movement for reconciling science and religion must come from the side of religion based on the immanence of God. A further reconciliation has then to be made between the immanence and transcendence of God.

Let us now consider ways of realising unity from various types of multiplicity. From the multiplicity of existences to the one existence, a pathway is made by representing the many existences as functions of a single variable which represents the one existence. Thus if x be the one existence which cannot be reduced in terms of simpler existences, then all the existences of the world may be arithmetical multiples of x. Imagine a universe where every entity is represented by a multiple of x. x is the unit of that world and furnishes its unity. As x vibrates, the whole universe vibrates. When x is created, the universe is created; and if x is destroyed, the universe is destroyed. The biological analogue is a world with a closed contour where a single seed of indivisible character–an atom of life–reproduces itself. Not only is every entity so produced representable by a number, as books in a library may be represented by numbers, but it is that number, for it and the number evolve in the same way. If the universe in which we live is the expression of a single entity, God, then everything in the world should be expressible as an arithmetical multiple of that entity. From the unit of being, then, we pass on to a line of beings.

Can this line of beings be then grouped into categories? Lines can be grouped into areas, volumes and so forth by a geometrical evolution. If all existences are arithmetical functions of a single entity or variable, then may not the fundamental categories of mind, time, space and matter be geometrical functions of the primal being? It is a hypothesis which, I believe, it is permissible to work on.

From the multiplicity of qualities, there is one that emerges at the bottom of each classification. It is the duality of the positive and negative. But the so-called duality is in fact a trinity, for the positive and the negative are in relation to the zero. Deeper than this trinity is the duality of being and becoming. Being furnishes the unit of the universe but not a direction. It is becoming that has, at the simplest, two directions–positive and negative. Being is the source and also the goal of becoming. All things come from being, are maintained by being and merge into being. The world is thus a process of becoming in which being melts to reform into being. Becoming is thus the differential of being. Everything in the world is a process of becoming. So is man.

The view of being both as multiplicity and as unity is itself one step removed from the view of being as having no quality whether of multiplicity or of unity. Unity is the simplest form of multiplicity. It is also the concrete form of no quality, for a unity has no quality other than being itself. Being then has two fronts–that which is the source of becoming and that which is the goal of becoming. These are the Sakti and Purusha of Hindu thought. Purusha is the unity of being into which all the desires of Sakti, all the processes of becoming lead. Purusha and Sakti form an entity of no quality, which may be personified as Arthanareeswara who is neither male nor female and yet is both. The world then is the process of Sakti seeking Purusha. On the way from Sakti to Purusha lies matter. On the way to Purusha lies spirit. Man is a bridge from matter to spirit. Man is a part of the process from Sakti to Purusha. He gathers up the strands of multiplicity which pass through matter and seeks the unity of spirit which merges into Purusha. The basic nature of man shows itself in his struggle to achieve unity from multiplicity in thought, in feeling, in action, in character. That is good and true and harmonious for man which leads towards Purusha, God. That is evil and false and discordant which leads away from God, towards disintegration into multiplicity, into separateness. God furnishes the measure of man’s universe. His twofold nature of Sakti and Purusha also furnishes the direction for man’s moral life and development and its reverse. Whence does man come? Out of cosmic energy, from the womb of Sakti. How does he live? Seeking the path of the good, the true, the beautiful, the harmonious, from Sakti to Purusha, from multiplicity to unity. Whither does he move? Into Purusha, merging into God. The life of man, the life of the universe is the way Sakti wooes her lord, Purusha, and thereby attains pure being which is free from the limitations of quality of becoming.

In such a world where being melts into becoming and reforms into being, there are three crucial stages. The melting of being into becoming is creation. The flow of becoming is the maintenance of the world. The merging of becoming into being is its destruction. Thus three processes are symbolized in Hindu thought as the work of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.

We have then three possible world views: of science which affirms the multiplicity of the world, of religion which affirms the unity of God, and of a view built both of science and religion which affirms both the multiplicity of the universe and the unity of God, a religion which deals not with matter or spirit but the matter-spirit, a religion of man whose vision is a symbol of the Viswarupa of God. For man’s vision is multiple in its contents and yet unified in its container, namely, himself. This is an image of Iswara who has the infinite multiplicity of the cosmos in his structure and holds it in the unity of his own being. Hinduism is the religion of Viswarupa which is the form of the universe in which God is immanent. To the Hindu, the world is a flow which can ignore neither matter through and from which it flows nor spirit into and through which it flows. There is room in Viswarupa for all forms of energy, all existences, all categories of being, all qualities of becoming, and yet it can never transcend the unity of God for which all religion stands. The reconciliation of science and religion, for which two continents of thought are searching, is possible in the old and yet young vision of Hinduism.

This vision of Viswarupa is needed now in India more than in the past, when India is emerging from a ‘pralaya’ of stagnation. India needs to keep before herself more than ever the concrete expression which the South Indian artist has given to Viswarupa in the conception and execution of the figure of Nataraja.

I sit dreaming before Nataraja. And as I sit, I see the Lord throwing aside the shackles of slumber. He shakes his body into motion. Ripples of rhythm pass down his limbs. Sounds ring. Colours flash. Flames of life rise and fall around him. The Lord of being breaks into the dance of becoming. Sakti starts to woo Purusha.

The Lord’s dance calls a universe into becoming. Stars blaze. Planets swing round. And in them, the Lord flashes his image in little specks that are men. These specks daft about the universe, numbering, measuring, labeling its harmonies, and, lo, they have called up, out of the mobility of becoming, a vision of being which is the Lord himself. The dance of becoming has merged into the Lord of being. Sakti has won Purusha.

As I wake from the dream, I see Nataraja standing and smiling; dancing and–yet not dancing.

BANGALORE,

27th October 1940.