According

PB August 2009
Spiritual Substance and Perfection in Indian Thought 39
which is full of pain, is the summum bonum of life,
the highest end. The Sankhya-yogins point out that
even the so-called pleasures of life lead to pain. The
dawn of true knowledge signals kaivalya, liberation,
and is the necessary condition for cessation of all
earthly pain.
Therefore, the Sankhya system neither posits
God as the highest reality nor God-realization as
the goal of life, but it does believe in the self and its
liberation as the ultimate ideal of human life.
Yoga
Yoga delineates the spiritual path leading to kaivalya
through the purification of mind and body. The
word ‘yoga’ ordinarily means ‘union’—the spiritual
union of the individual soul with the universal soul.
This is the sense in which it is used in Vedanta. But
in Patanjali’s system of yoga it is used to denote
samadhi, meditative concentration.
The Bhagavadgita has defined ‘yoga’ as that
state ‘obtaining which one does not think of
any other acquisition as being higher or more
worthy of realization, and being firmly rooted
in which one is not shaken even by the greatest
sorrow’. Yoga is the state beyond all misery and
pain. Patanjali gives a somewhat different meaning
of yoga. To him it means spiritual effort to attain
perfection through the control of the body,
senses, and mind, and right discrimination between
Purusha and Prakriti.
The Yoga philosophy advocates the need for a
healthy mind in a healthy body. For this reason,
purification of mind and body are necessary prerequisites
for perfection. It preaches not emaciation
but perfection of the body. A sound mind needs a
sound body. Therefore passions, which have a disturbing
effect on body and mind, must be mastered
through the path of aṣṭānga yoga. This is the eightfold
path of spiritual discipline, which teaches the
control of body and mind in five steps—yama,
niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra—and then
the focussing of the controlled mind through a further
three advanced steps: dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and
samādhi.
Though this system accepts the reality of God,
his importance lies mainly in being an object of
meditation. He is not the being that creates, sustains,
or destroys the universe. He is not the moral
governor of the universe, nor does he grant liberation.
Nevertheless, Yoga is a path specifically oriented
to spiritual perfection.
Nyaya-Vaisheshika
The Nyaya and Vaisheshika are allied systems that
are both realistic and pluralistic. Nyaya is known
for its logic and epistemology and Vaisheshika for
its atomistic metaphysics. Though these systems accept
God, they do not regard him as the creator of
this universe. God is an eternal substance, coequal
with innumerable atoms and innumerable individual
souls which limit him and distort his glory
and greatness. As Chandradhar Sharma points out,
in the Nyaya-Vaisheshika system God has been reduced
to the status of a supervisor, the first mover
in the process of Creation. The actual process of
Creation unfolds in keeping with the law of karma
or adṛṣṭa, the unseen effects of actions. Liberated
souls do not merge in God nor do they commune
with him. They do not share his knowledge and
bliss. God is also not the moral governor of this
world; he does not reward or punish human actions.
Hence bhakti, devotion, has no place in this
system. There is no internal relation between God,
the human souls, and the world. All relations are
external.
The Nyaya-Vaisheshika concept of self also has
some distinctive features. This system maintains
the plurality of souls—as many souls as there are
bodies—much like the Sankhyas. But consciousness,
according to the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas, is only
an accidental property and not the essence of the
soul. It arises in the soul only in a knowledge situation,
when the soul comes in contact with an external
object of knowledge through the senses and
mind. Further, in the state of moksha, liberation,
the soul is freed from all attributes. This is a negative
concept, for if the soul is a substance, absence
of attributes reduces it to ‘a mere nothing’.
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