Vedic Gods in Upanishads
3. ATTITUDE TOWARDS VEDIC GODS
In order to appreciate the teaching of the Upaniṣads we must understand first the attitude of these texts to the sacrificial cult of the Brāhmaṇas.
The spirit of the Upaniṣads by its very nature is opposed to ritual. In the Brihadāraṇyaka, he who worships a divinity other than the self is described as a domestic animal of the gods.
And it is also stated that while Yama, the god of death, has his abode in sacrifice, sacrifice has its basis in the fees paid to the priests. Parodying the priestly procession in a sacrifice, the Chāndogya describes a procession of dogs chanting “Om! Let us eat. Om! Let us drink…”
By far the most scathing attack on ritual is to be met with in the Muṇḍaka where the sacrificial forms are compared to unsafe boats, and those who value them are characterized as fools that are overtaken repeatedly by old age and death.
In several texts of the Upaniṣads, however, the opposition to ritual is not so open; the sacrifice in its usual form is ignored, and an allegorical or philosophical meaning is given to it.
The task of the Āraṇyakas, as we remarked earlier, is to allegorize ritual, but this is continued in the Upaniṣads also.
We have a typical instance in the opening sections of the Brihadāraṇyaka, where the horse-sacrifice (Aśva- medhā) is interpreted allegorically:
Over-lordship of the earth may be gained by sacrificing a horse. But spiritual autonomy is to be achieved by renouncing the whole universe which the Upaniṣad conceives in the image of a horse.
In the Chāndogya the entire life of man is symbolically explained as a soma sacrifice, and offerings to the different manifestations of breath (prāṇa) take the place of agṇi-hotra.
Another mode by which the Upaniṣads indicate the inferior status of ritual is to show that it leads only to the world of the Fathers which is a temporary abode for man and from which he must return to this earth in due course to follow the cycle of birth and death again.
When we turn to some of the later Upaniṣads, however, we find a spirit of accommodation and an anxiety to assign a place to sacrifice in the Upaniṣadic scheme.
Thus in the Śvetāśvatara, the mode of ancient prayer (Brāhma pūrvyam) to the gods like Agni and Soma is recommended, and it is said that where sacrifice is performed, there inspiration is born.
But even here the goal that is held as worthy of attainment is not the heavenly world, but God by knowing whom one is said to be released from all fetters.
For the antecedents of the main doctrine of the Upaniṣads we must turn rather to those hymns of the Veda which reveal a monistic attitude than to the Brāhmaṇas which are liturgical manuals.
The tendency which appears in the philosophical hymns of the Veda to reduce the multitude of gods to one principle becomes prominent in the Upaniṣads, and the implications of such a doctrine are worked out in greater detail.
Questioned about the number of gods, Yājñyavalkya starts with the number 3306, and then successively gives the numbers, thirty-three, six, three, two, one and half, and finally one. The one God is Brāhman whose powers the other gods are.
The Vāsus, the Rudras and the Ādityas, who constitute the principal groups of gods, are identified with the different cosmic phenomena and individual functions, such as the sun and the sky, the moon and he stars, the senses and the mind.
The Maitrāyaṇīya characterizes the gods including Brāhma, Rudra and Viṣṇu as the principal manifestations of the supreme, the immortal, the incorporeal Brāhman.
In the Kena, Indra learns from Umā Haimavatī that the source of the power and the glory of the gods is Brāhman.
The Kaṭha- Upaniṣad declares that for fear of the supreme Brāhman the gods carry out their allotted functions. Even Prajāpati, the highest god of the Brāhmaṇas, is subordinated to Brāhman. In the Kauṣītaka, he, along with Indra, is made a door-keeper of the abode of the Absolute.
Thus, the Upaniṣads would brook no rival to Brāhman, the supreme reality. The “ekaṁ sat” (the one reality) of the Ṛig-Veda becomes in the Upaniṣads “ekaṁ eva a-dvitīyam” (one only without a second).