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The Beautiful in the Upanishads
WHEN the Rigveda says
idam srestham jyotisam jyotih agat
Lo! the supreme Light of lights is come, a varied
rusadvasta rusati swetyagat araigu krisna sadananyasyah
The white Mother comes reddening with the ruddy child; the dark Mother opens wide her chambers, the feeling and the expression of the beautiful raise no questioning; they are authentic as well as evident. All will recognise at once that we have here beautiful things said in a beautiful way. No less authentic however is the sense of the beautiful that underlies these Upanishadic lines:
na tatra suryo bhati na candratarakam
nema vidyuto bhanti kuto'yam
agnih tasya bhasa sarvam idam vibhati
There the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars; these lightnings too there shine not; how then this fire! That shines and therefore all shine in its wake; by the sheen of That, all this shines. Only, to some perhaps the beauty may not appear as Page 339 evident and apparent. The Spirit of beauty that resides in the Upanishadic consciousness is more retiring and reticent. It dwells in its own privacy, in its own home, as it were, and therefore chooses to be bare and austere, simple and sheer. Beauty means usually the beauty of form, even if it be not always the decorative, ornamental and sumptuous form. The early Vedas aimed at the perfect form (surupakrtnum}, the faultless expression, the integral and complete embodiment; the gods they envisaged and invoked were gleaming powers carved out of harmony and beauty and figured close to our modes of apprehension (supayanah). But the Upanishads came to lay stress upon what is beyond the form, what the eye cannot see nor the vision reflect:
na sandrsi tisthati rupamasya na caksusa pasyati kascanainam
Its figure does not lie in the field of vision, none can see it with the eye The form of a thing can be beautiful; but the formless too has its beauty. Indeed, the beauty of the formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the soul of beauty—that is what suffuses, with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm, the realisation and poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms that are scattered abroad in their myriad manifest beauty hold within themselves a secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name of Beauty can be compared to nothing on the phenomenal hemisphere of Nature; it has no adequate image or representation below:
na tasya pratima asti—
it cannot be defined or figured in the terms of the phenomenal consciousness. In speaking of it, however, the Upanishads invariably and repeatedly refer to two attributes that characterise its fundamental nature. These two aspects have made such an impression upon the consciousness of the Upanishadic seer that his enthusiasm almost wholly plays about them and is Page 340 centred on them. When he contemplates or communes with the Supreme Object, these seem to-him to be the mark of its authenticity, the seal of its high status and the reason of all the charm and magic it possesses. The first aspect or attribute is that of light—the brilliance, the solar effulgence—ravitulya-arupah—the bright, clear, shadowless Light of lights—virajam subhram jyotisam jyotih. The second aspect is that of delight, the bliss, the immortality inherent in that wide effulgence—anandarupam amrtam yad vibhati. And what else is the true character, the soul of beauty than light and delight? "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." And a thing of joy is a thing of light. Joy is the radiance rippling- over a thing of beauty. Beauty is always radiant: the charm, the loveliness of an object is but the glow of light that it emanates. And it would not be a very incorrect mensuration to measure the degree of beauty by the degree of light radiated. The diamond is not only a thing of value, but a thing of beauty also, because of the concentrated and undimmed light that it enshrines within itself. A dark, dull and dismal thing, devoid of interest and attraction becomes aesthetically precious and significant as soon as the artist presents it in terms of the values of light. The entire art of painting is nothing but the expression of beauty, in and through the modalities of light. And where there is light, there is cheer and joy. Rasamaya and jyotirmaya are thus the two conjoint characteristics fundamental to the nature of the ultimate reality. Sometimes these two are named as the solar and the lunar aspect. The solar aspect refers obviously to the Light, that is to say, to the Truth; the lunar aspect refers to the rasa (Soma), to Immortality, to Beauty proper,—
yatte susamam hrdayam adhi candramasi sritam
0 Lord of Immortality! Thy heart of beauty that is sheltered in the moon—
or, as the Prasna Upanishad has it,
rayireva candramah.. .murtireva rayih Page 341 The Moon means Delight... and Delight means the created form.
The perception of beauty in the Upanishadic consciousness is something elemental—of concentrated essence. It silhouettes the main contour, outlines the primordial gestures. Pregnant and pulsating with the burden of beauty, the mantra here reduces its external expression to a minimum. The body is bare and unadorned, and even in its nakedness, it has not the emphatic and vehement musculature of an athlete; rather it tends to be slim and slender and yet vibrant with the inner nervous vigour and glow. What can be more bare and brief and full to the brim of a self-gathered luminous energy than, for example:
yat pranena na praniti yena pranah
That which lives not by Life, but which makes Life live—
or, nalpe sukhamasti bhumaiva sukham.. .yo vai bhuma tadamrtam atha yadalpam tanmartyam—
In the Little there lies no happiness, the Vast alone is the Happiness. The Vast is the Immortality, the Little is the Mortality. The rich and sensuous beauty luxuriating in high colour and ample decoration that one meets often in the creation of the earlier Vedic seers returned again, in a more chiselled and polished and stylised manner, in the classical poets. The Upanishads in this respect have a certain kinship with the early poets of the intervening age—Vyasa and Valmiki. Upama Kdliddsasya—Kalidasa revels in figures and images; they are profusely heaped on one another and usually possess a complex and composite texture. Valmiki's images are simple and elemental, brief and instinct with a vast resonance, spar and full of power. The same brevity and simplicity, vibrant Page 342 with an extraordinary power of evocation, are also characteristic of the Upanishadic mantra. With Valmiki's
akasamiva dusparam—
or, gatarcisamivanalam—
like a fire whose light of flame is gone,
fiery as the burning sun, full of forbearance like the earth,
can be compared, in respect of vivid and graphic terseness and
vrksa iva stabdho divi tisthatyekah—
The One stands alone in the heaven motionless, like a
or, Saravat tanmayo bhavet—
Be wholly fixed on That, like an arrow on its target,
or again, yathema nadyah syandamanah samudrayanah— like these rivers that flowing journey towards the sea.
Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest art, precisely because it does not aim at being artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a deeper strand of consciousness. That consciousness seeks consciousness itself, the fullness of consciousness, the awareness and possession Page 343 of the Truth and Reality,—the one thing which, if known, gives the knowledge of all else. And this consciousness of the Truth is also Delight, the perfect Bliss, the Immortality where the whole universe resolves itself into its original state of rasa, that is to say, of essential and inalienable harmony and beauty. Page 344 |