| Essence Of Hinduism |
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HINDU PHILOSOPHY |
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| That these are not
contradictory but complementary conceptions of God due to our own limitations may be made
clear by an illustration. Suppose you raise your naked eyes to the sky to look at the
midday sun. You are dazzled and cannot look at him. Then you use a smoked glass and see
him as a red round globe. The sun you tried to see at first is not different from the sun
you see now. The same sun is blazing in the sky. Similarly the Absolute in itself is
called Brahman. The Absolute in relation to the world or viewed through human spectacles
is lsvara. In other words Isvara is the best image of Brahman that we can possibly get under human conditions of knowledge. It is the only way in which the Absolute can appear to the human mind. Hence lsvara is personal God, while Brahman is supra personal Being. Usually personality implies the existence of some other beings differentiated from the person referred to. Therefore it can belong only to one who stands in some relation to others beside himself. Such a condition can not obviously apply to the Absolute, the All. There can be nothing outside it and differentiated from it. The Absolute is not a person standing over against other persons. It is the unifying principle behind all persons. Therefore it is only when we conceive of God in relation to the world as its creator, sustainer and destroyer that we can speak of the personality of God. A more correct expression than personality of God, if by God we mean Brahman and not Isvara, is probably personality in God. The man in the street generally imagines God as simply a glorified man. As a man eats, enjoys, fights and marries, so does his God eats, enjoy, fight and marry. |
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| About Hindu Philosophy |
