Who is individual – soul or body?

 

Ancient philosophies- Eastern and Western described the concept of man on the basis of metaphysics and developed their philosophies. The ancient Roman thinkers took man as a combination of soul and body. Plato made that the soul is such entity which is changeless and eternal and objects of thoughts. This soul is not a harmony of the body and hence dependent upon the body as music is upon the lyric. The soul directs and sometimes opposes the body as independent of it.

The essential nature of soul is to live. While Aristotle founds that soul is an actualization of capacities provided by certain combination of the four elements in conjunction with pneum or breath akin to the ether and the carrier of life in the sperm. Soul is the first actuality of the body may be likened to that of cutting to the axe or of vision of the eye. Without the body it could not exist and just as it in its entirely dependent upon the body, so our various emotional and mental states are forms and actualization for which different bodily states afford the stuff and potentiality. This dependence upon the body for its existence does not however mean that soul is a physical substance and as like of Democritus or like Pythagoreans, who maintained the harmony of the body. 

Thus Aristotle mark that soul is the entire vital principle of any organism and the sum of its power and process is in plants the soul is merely a nutritive and reproduction power but in animal it is also sensitive and locomotive power and in man it is as well as power of reason and thoughts.

But Stoic viewed that man as a microcosm or small edition of the universe just as the universe is the macrocosm or large edition of man. Like the universe man is both body and soul and his soul is the part of the soul of the world and universe. And like the world soul and primal world stuff is pure fire infused with reason, at the same time, have some admixture of air and even of the other elements, which would account for the four different types of these temperaments, its seat is in the heart and thence, its functions extend to the other organs and party of the body. Like the arms of an octopus from the central body.

What may be the combinations of man, they experienced and provided the meticulous data that what they realized and observed and felt.  However great the geographical and historical distance which separated certain civilizations in ancient past from eastern to western, the ancient India, profound by the grandeur of thoughts about the combination of man. The ancient Hindus worked more on understanding the concept of human being and they came up human being of life as the combination of real and unreal, a knit of the existent and the non- existent. The true self have been the main topic of investigation in the Upnisads.  Yes, certainly Socrates advocated the concept of ‘know thy self’ but Hindus were very much trained to made the touch stone of knowing the self with the concept of reality and non- reality.

Hindus differentiated soul and body by Atman and Sharir and accepted that both soul and body are two different elements. Samkhya took soul as the most essential element and called it Pursa and the first important element of the dualism of evolution of universe. Vedanta also made Atman- the soul as Saski, witness, conscious and eternal and one with Brahman – the universal soul.

The idea of immortality of the soul was the common property of all Hindu philosophies and this idea was so completely taken as for granted that it look in vain for any elaborate argument in support of it. Max Muller added, “Mortality with the Hindus is so entirely restricted to the body which decays and decomposes before our very eyes, that such as expression as “Atmano mrita tvam”. Immortality of the self sounds almost tautological in Sanskrit.”

 No doubt, the followers of Brihaspati would deny a future life but all the other schools rather fear than doubt a future life.  But all the other schools rather fear than doubt a future life, a long continued metempsychosis, by subject, samkara means, what is real and true, in fact, the self while the object means for him, what is unreal and phenomenal, such as the body with its organs, in “I AM” the verb has a totally different character from what it has in “THOU ART” or “HE IS.”

Such statements therefore as ‘I am strong’ or ‘I am blind’ arise from a false apprehension which though it is inseparable from human thoughts. In Mahamudgara (The hammer of folly) ascribed Samkara, edited and translated by Durga Das Ray show the state of mind in which the true Vedantist is meant to maintain himself “AS IS BIRTH SO IS DEATH AND SO IS THE DWELLING IN THE MOTHER’S WOMB, THUS IS MANIFEST THE MISERT OF THE WORLD, HOW CAN THERE BE SATISFACTION HER FOR THEE.”

But latter, the concept of monism the concept of self is titled by Ramanuja towards the unknown to whom we call GOD - he who makes our body as the temple of god and of the voice of god within us, nay, we repeat with Saint Paul, that we live and move and have our being in god, yet we shrink from adopting the god and man is the same.

Whereas Samkhya took Purusa as pure conscious, eternal and real knower but buddhi (intellect) is subjective or psychological senses. It is that though which there is in regard to a cow and etc. The conviction of this is so and so, not otherwise, this is cow and not horse, this is buddhi which manifest things like virtue, knowledge, dispassionateness, super human power and so on. Whereas again, ego, ahamkar is assumption or misconception and buddhinatryas and karmendriyas are the parts of the body and different to pursa which is the self, Prakarti (NATURE) rising in the form of buddhi, ahamkara and manas (mind) to the height or the depth of individual existence, the Pursa or self always remains,, after as well as before his release until the final liberation has been accomplished and everything like body has been completely removed or transmigration continues and the pursa is supposed  to be clothes in what is call the linga-sarira (subtle body) and therefore pursa is real and true self.

The idea of subtle body by the side of our gross body is very natural and we know that among the Greeks like Pythagoras claimed subtle ethereal clothing for the soul apart from its grossest clothing when united with the body.

But the Vedantists look upon this thin and transparent (Sukshma Sarira)  soul as a seminal or potential Sakti body which at death leaves the coarse body without being injured itself.  Now the function of Yoga is subduing away of the self from all that is not self is the highest object of this philosophy and by Ascetic exercises delivering the self from the fetters of the body and the body senses.

Gotama too holds that sense are different from the Atman and in order to prove this he argued that if each sense could perceive by itself and each senses could perceive its own object only the eye colour, the ear sound, the skin warmth and that therefore what perceives all there impression together at the same time and in the same object must be something different from the several sense namely the atman. But here the question is whether the body is the same as the atman, a question which would never occur to Vedantists but to Gotma and he asked it and solved it in his own way and it cannot be, he say, because, when the body has been once destroyed by being burnt, the consequences of good and evil deeds would cease to pursue the self through an endless series of births and rebirths. The perplex minute in which philosophers meet with the question, why with the dual organ of vision, there is no duality of perception and therefore why if memory is supposed to be a quality or mode of the self, mere remembrance of an acid substance can make our mouth water. Gotma goes on to show that if the body be not an atman then neither can manas (mind) be conceived as the atman.

The self is the knower, while the mind or manas is the instrument (karana) of knowledge by which  attention is fixed on one thing at a time the self is eternal and not only in this life and it is without beginning and therefore without end. The smile of a new born child can only arise from memory of previous experiences as Gotam said, while our modern psycho-physiologists would probably see in the smile or the cries of a new born child as a reflex action of muscles.

The buddhi or intellect in the Nyaya philosophy is totally different from the buddhi of Samkhya. In Samkhya Kapila’s concept of buddhi is eternal while the concept of buddhi of Gotma is distinctly declared to be non-eternal. Again the buddhi of Samkhya is a comic principle and independent of self and meant to account for the existence of the light of reasoning in the while universe while in the Nayaya philosophy the buddhi signified the subjective activity of though in the acquisition of knowledge or in the lighting up and appreciating of the inert impression received by the senses. This knowledge can come to an end and vanished by forgetfulness, an eternal essence like the buddhi of the Samkhya though it may be ignored, can never be destroyed.

Further, Gotma in Nayaya declared quiet clearly that nor does knowledge belong to the manas which is but  the instrument of knowledge, it arises from the conjunction of atman which is manas and on the other sides of manas with senses (indriyas). Manas are the instrument and the wielder if that instrument like the wielder of an axe must be someone different from it.

The most interesting and most ignored philosophy of Hindus is Charvaka and in the Charvaka, the Bhraspati holds that what was called as soul was not a thing by itself but was simply the body over again, it was the body that felt, that saw and heard, that remembered and though, though they saw it every day rotting away and decomposing, that they with the smile, appealing to the intoxication power that can be develop by mixing certain ingredients which by themselves are not intoxicating, as an analogy to the production of soul from body. As since ‘I am fat’ this fatness resides only in the body, it alone is the soul and no other it is. And, such phrases as ‘My Body’ are only significant metaphorically. In this way, the soul seems to have been to them the body qualified by the attribute of intelligence and therefore supposed to perish with the body.

The most effective wave of epistemology of human being is the Buddhist flow in which Vasubandu goes into more detailed when he confronted the existence of pure conscience (Vignaptimatrata). With inherent power, this potential attribute with its force perform threefold modification, first of all it manifests itself as Vipaka or Alayavijinana which is a store house of consciousness. Then this universal consciousness further manifests itself into two forms, it takes the form of an individual subject or ego and secondly it manifests itself in the formal the various mental states and of the so called external objects. Memory, therefore, has not received the attention which it deserves from Hindu philosophers, if it treated as a means of knowledge then it falls under experience, which is either immediate or mediate. Every experience is supposed to leave an impression or modification of the mind which is capable of being revived. Another manifestation of memory is the act of remembering or recognizing.