ISAVASYOPANISHAD - 4.

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17/05/2018

ISAVASYOPANISHAD - 4.


Sri Adi Swami Sankaracharya discusses the nature of action and knowledge and their relation between one another. Knowledge as Shankara understands it is not the knowledge that the human being is familiar with.

The knowledge of the human being is knowledge of something other than the knower. It is always knowledge of some object or objects. It is divided knowledge that separates the object from the subject. It is incomplete knowledge, for, by it, it is not possible to know the subject and the object at one and the same time. When the one is known, the other is discarded and forgotten.

It is not possible to have whole knowledge through a process, and perception or human knowledge is evidently a process. Process means change, and change is movement towards some thing or some state which marks the process as distinct from perfection. Hence, human knowledge is a perishable process of an ever non-enduring struggle for perfection.

A struggle is not the same as an achievement, and truly speaking, human knowledge never achieves anything, substantially.

The knowing faculty knows an object only as it wants to know it and as it is capable of knowing it, and not as the object is really in itself. The form and the nature of objects are determined by the form and the nature of the conceptual modifications of the faculty of knowing.

Thus human knowledge is simply coating an existing object the true nature of which is never known.

 The knowledge of an individual is simply artificial. This is not the knowledge that Shankara is speaking of when he distinguishes it from action. Human knowledge is an action alone, because it is produced by the motion of the mind and the senses.

The knowledge propounded in the Advaita Vedanta is objectless knowledge, and it is never produced but realised. It is not the knowledge of something but the knowledge of the knower himself. It is atma-sakshatkara that Shankara means by knowledge when he says that action is the antithesis of knowledge.

To be continued ...


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