The Ethics of Shri Shankara
by Hari Prasad Shastri

A few years ago I was in the audience at a meeting which was being addressed by that scholarly old lady, Dr Rhys Davids. She was speaking on some aspects of the Upanishadic metaphysics, and in the course of her lecture she pronounced the Upanishads to be without ethical teachings. At the conclusion of her speech I rose and quoted text after text from the Upanishads in support of the ethical value of the classics:

Speak the truth; follow righteousness...Let thy parents be God to thee. Let thy teacher be a God to thee. Let thy uninvited guest be a God to thee. (Taittiriya Upanishad, I.xi.1-2)

Truth alone prevails ultimately, not falsehood. (Mundaka Upanishad III.i.6)

Do not covet the wealth of others. (Isha Upanishad, 1)

Shri Shankara has clearly shown (in his commentary on Vedanta Sutra II.3.38) that a moral purpose is subserved in creation. The world of finite individuals or 'jivas' is a fact; it is a 'vale of soul-making'. The life of every individual is one of ethical aspiration and endeavour. It is by perpetual self-transcendence that the Self actualizes its infinite potentality and reality. The Self-hood is an ethical or dynamic category. The divine in the human has ethics (dharma) as its basis. It is strange that Advaita scholars of such eminence as Deussen have fallen into the error of referring to Vedanta as unethical. The oneness of Self (Atman) is to be achieved and enjoyed by a strict discipline, which is mainly ethical. Man is a spiritual being, finite-infinite, far removed from the developed brutes.

Institutional Christianity sponsors the basic dualism that separates the world of created things and beings from the Creator and necessitates divine mediatorship and vicarious redemption by such a mediator. This view is uncritically accepted. The doctrine of Shri Shankara is an uncompromising monism, not, as is alleged, a negation of all morality.

It is true that an ethical life is not held as the goal of life, but it is essential for the realization of the goal; and on the attainment of the supreme end of life, the sage still continues to be one 'who is all the time engaged in the good of all'. (Bhagavad Gita V.25)

Not doing but being is the ideal of ethical culture. To bring about holiness is the final aim of the perfectionist ethics of Shankara's Yoga. The philosopher breaks away from a Life of unreflecting acquiescence in the satisfaction of animal wants which exhibits itself in brutes. Man looks before and after, and devotes himself to the attainment of life eternal in and through a moral life of the highest order. To Shri Shankara the whole world is worthy of love and worship. The highest good is 'beyond action, a stage of supreme illumination in which there is neither day nor night, neither reality nor unreality, but the good alone.' (Shvetashvatara Upanishad IV.18)

In his Mysticism and Logic, Bertrand Russell recommends elimination of ethics from philosophy, whereas Shri Shankara sees an ethical end in a supra-moral state of existence in which there is no possibility of evil conduct. Both the active and the contemplative life contribute to the supreme illumination Moksha, or liberation.

In the Katha Upanishad (I.ii.1-4) it is made abundantly clear that what is pleasant is not necessarily good; that is, it does not lead to the supreme good. Is not ethical conduct a negation of the narrow personal pleasure which binds the soul to the earth? Shri Shankara is an anti-pragmatic philosopher who places the highest good in the realm of knowledge of truth. His ethics is perfectionism.

Shri Shankara opens his ethical enquiry with a rigid antithesis between the heteronomy of nature and the autonomy of spirit, and holds it as an essential prerequisite of morals. He calls nature-necessity, as the realm of ignorance (avidya), a prolific source of evil. Not coercion but right education is the instrument of moral causation. Man as a moral being must be recognized as the possessor of a free will.

The basic presupposition of the moral life is the elimination of non-moral instinctive preferences and aversions (raga and dvesha). This is the 'original sin'. In animal life it is a necessity; in man it is to be moralized. The Katha Upanishad (II.i.1) says that man, by nature, looks outward, but the wise look within because they hanker after eternal life, a vision of the Self. To be ruled by empirical ends is to be in bondage, to be led away from the path of rectitude. Shri Shankara, commenting on Vedanta Sutra I.i.4, says: 'A man, acting on external things and making the attainnent of his own good or happiness and the repulsion of that which threatens the opposite (evil or unhappiness) the end, does not realize the summum bonum, in spite of his hankering after it.' Both Shri Shankara and Kant call the heteronomy of nature - the determination of man's activity by the consideration of personal happiness or unhappiness, by the pathological motives - the very negation of freedom, a perpetual bondage. It may seem that moral culture argues a forcible wrenching of the mind and sensory apparatus from the natural outgoing flow, a restraining of the impulses of the senses and a directing of these impulses towards the Self. This is the path of self-discipline, by which man can hope to regain his Self, his essential nature.

Every man brings with him from his previous existence a stock of innate cravings and capacities , and they constitute his psychical make-up. Prakriti, or Nature, the instinctive basis of this psychic continuum, expresses itself in peculiar cravings. This is not the insidious and dangerous doctrine of naturalism. Shri Shankara, with unerring psychological insight, accepts this psychical fact and makes it a sub-structure for his idealistic or rationalistic theory to stand on. 'Every man according to his light' is the motto. Let us understand another word used by Shri Shankara. It is Svabhava (one's own nature) and it is not a synonym for Prakriti (Nature). 'The intrinsic nature of the Supreme Brahman is the inner Self in every organism, and by "ones own nature" (Svabhava) is meant the intrinsic spiritual nature of man, which, transcending the body and soul, terminates, by way of the inner Self of all selves, in the Supreme Brahman'. (Commentary on Bhagavad Gita VIII.3)

To recapitulate: the word Prakriti means the instinctive, non-moral, animal spontaneity, whereas Svabhava is reserved for the higher spontaneity of realized moral perfection. Shri Shankara is unambiguously clear in his doctrine that the power of self-determination or autonomy is given unreservedly to man as a spiritual being (homo noumenon).

In his discussion of the question of free-will, which most Western philosophers hopelessly deny, Shri Shankara shows his marked superiority over them. In his commentary on the first verse of the Kena Upanishad, he considers the question raised in this verse: 'Willed by whom does the directed mind go towards its object?' He observes that the mind itself is not a totally independent, self-determining free agency. This is because it often finds itself driven into an evil course of action, even though it is aware of the painful outcome. 'The mind, though conscious of the consequences, wills evil; and, though dissuaded, it does engage in deeds of intensely sorrowful result.'

The evidence of the play of free causality is in the spiritual and not merely the mind-endowed being. Here is the final verdict of Shri Shankara on the point:

....Hence this is said to be the object of human free will; the original unregenerate nature of man, which is conditioned by attachment and aversion, impels a man to pursue a particular line of conduct... while a man who resolutely sets his face against attachment and aversion, becomes endowed with a spiritual vision, is no longer subject to nature-necessity, and is therefore free.
(Commentary on Bhagavad Gita III.34).

Inner and outer control (shama and dama), without the cultivation of which in daily, nay hourly, life, the attainment of God-vision is impossible, means the pressing of all the outgoing tendencies and impulses into the service of the moral life. This Shri Shankara calls duty. Spiritual culture must precede spiritual realization.

Let us not be disturbed by the accusation of Professor Keith that there is not the faintest glimmering of ethics in the Upanishads. The same can be said of any system of absolute idealism in the East or West. Keith stretches the logic to breaking point and ignores the higher ethics of a Paramahansa who lives for the enlightenment of others. Metaphysics is not ethics but a continuation of ethics on a higher plane.

It is the poverty of the metaphysical sense which leads some narrow thinkers of the Christian church to consider ethics to be the goal rather than the means to liberation or beatitude. This ethically-inspired personalism is branded by Russell as 'bad metaphysics'. The claims of logic are absolute and paramount, and personalism is only a half-way house to idealism.

Any careful student of Buddhism knows that the ethics and renunciation attributed to the Holy Tathagata (the Buddha) are based on the Upanishads from which the Lord of Enlightenment drew his inspiration and which are the foundations of the philosophy of Shri Shankara. The Bhagavad Gita is the spirit of the Upanishads and its lofty ethics are of the very highest type. Shri Shankara bases his whole philosophy on the Gita.