Sachchidananda

A biased and dreadfully incomplete history of Indian philosophy

In many previous posts — fourteen, to be precise — I invoked the concept of Sachchidananda, yet almost exclusively in the context and as the foundation stone of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. In this post I want to highlight the importance of this concept in the wider context of Indian philosophy.

Sachchidananda (significance given by the Mother, Hedychium J.G. Koening, Ginger Lily). Painting by Dominica Alcantara.

The philosophical landscape of India is dominated by a persistent quest to comprehend the nature of reality. Among the most profound and convincing formulations to emerge from this millennia-long inquiry is the concept of Sachchidānanda (सच्चिदानन्द). This single, composite term encapsulates a vision of the Absolute, Brahman, as a triune unity of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. It is a substantive definition of the ultimate ground of all existence.

Sachchidānanda is a Sanskrit copulative compound formed from three distinct yet inseparable concepts: Sat, Cit, and Ānanda. The compound nature of this term is philosophically significant, for it implies that the three components are not in a hierarchical relationship, nor are any two merely attributes of the third. Rather, they are mutually implicative or inclusive. It is owing to the limitations of our separative consciousness that three terms are needed to adequately comprehend That which ultimately exists, experiences, and enjoys.

In the context of Sachchidānanda, Sat should not be confused with the contingent existence of objects in the phenomenal world. It is the very “is-ness” to which all objects, including space-time, owe their phenomenal being. Chit, as used in the Upanishads and later philosophical systems, does not denote our ordinary consciousness, which is a stream of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions directed towards objects. It is pure consciousness — that which makes perception and knowledge possible, the sourceless light which illumines objects but does not depend on the objects it illumes. Nor does Ānanda denote an ordinary emotional state. It signifies neither the fleeting happiness derived from pleasant sensory experiences nor the fulfillment of desires. Rather, it is the intrinsic, uncaused, and limitless bliss which is the very nature of consciousness and existence.

While the fully formed compound Sachchidānanda appears explicitly in later texts, its conceptual roots run deep into the earliest strata of Indian thought, particularly the major Upanishads composed between approximately 800 and 600 BCE. The emergence of the term represents a powerful synthesis, the culmination of centuries of philosophical inquiry into the ultimate nature of reality.

In my own writings, I often describe Sachchidānanda in relational rather than absolute terms: Brahman relates to the world in a threefold manner; as substance (Sat) it constitutes it, as consciousness (Chit) it contains it, and as infinite delight (Ānanda) it casts itself into and enjoys its forms and movements.

Following its crystallization in the later Upanishads, the concept of Sachchidānanda became the central axis around which the major schools of Vedanta revolved. The term “Vedanta,” meaning the “end or culmination of the Veda,” encompasses all schools of Hindu philosophy that take the Upanishads as their primary scriptural authority. The interpretation of Sachchidānanda and its implications for the relationship between the Absolute (Brahman), the individual self (Ātman), and the world (Jagat) became the principal battleground for the three most influential Vedantic thinkers: Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva. Their disagreements gave rise to three distinct philosophical systems — Advaita (Non-dualism), Viśiṣṭādvaita (Qualified Non-dualism), and Dvaita (Dualism).

Sri Aurobindo discussed these systems on several occasions. One of them is the following:

In the age that Shankara lived in [c. 8th century CE], it was right that Jnana [knowledge] should be exalted at the expense of works [Karma]. The great living force with which he had to deal, was ... the triumphant Karmakanda which made the faithful performance of Vedic ceremonies the one path and heaven the highest goal. In his continual anxiety to prove that these ceremonies could not be the path, he bent the bow as far as he could in the other direction and left the impression that works could not be the path to salvation at all. Had he laid stress on Karma as one of the ways to salvation [as the Bhagavad Gita later did], the people would not have understood him; they would have thought that they had one more authority for their belief in rites and ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation.

These things must be remembered when we find Shankara and Ramanuja and Madhwa differing so widely from each other in their interpretation of the Upanishad. It was necessary that the Scripture should be interpreted by Shankara wholly in the light of Adwaita, the Monistic conception of the Eternal, so that the Monistic idea might receive its definite and consummate philosophical expression; for a similar reason it was necessary that Madhwa [c. 13th century CE] should interpret them wholly in the light of the Dwaita or dualistic conception and that Ramanuja [c. 11th-12th century CE] should find a reconciliation in Visishtadwaita, a modified Monism. All these conceptions of the Eternal have their own truth and their own usefulness to the soul in its effort to reach Him. [17:202]

Before quoting another significant passage concerning these philosophical systems, it will be worthwhile to reproduce a passage from The Life Divine by way of introduction:

Sad Brahman, Existence pure, indefinable, infinite, absolute, is the last concept at which Vedantic analysis arrives in its view of the universe, the fundamental Reality which Vedantic experience discovers behind all the movement and formation which constitute the apparent reality. It is obvious that when we posit this conception, we go entirely beyond what our ordinary consciousness, our normal experience contains or warrants. The senses and sense-mind know nothing whatever about any pure or absolute existence. All that our sense-experience tells us of, is form and movement.... At the most in the phenomenon of self-awareness or behind it, we get sometimes a glimpse of something immovable and immutable, something that we vaguely perceive or imagine that we are beyond all life and death, beyond all change and formation and action. Here is the one door in us that sometimes swings open upon the splendour of a truth beyond and, before it shuts again, allows a ray to touch us — a luminous intimation which, if we have the strength and firmness, we may hold to in our faith and make a starting-point for another play of consciousness than that of the sense-mind, for the play of Intuition.

For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, “I am He”, “Thou art That, O Swetaketu”, “All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman”.

But Intuition by the very nature of its action in man, working as it does from behind the veil, active principally in his more unenlightened, less articulate parts, served in front of the veil, in the narrow light which is our waking conscience, only by instruments that are unable fully to assimilate its messages —Intuition is unable to give us the truth in that ordered and articulated form which our nature demands. Before it could effect any such completeness of direct knowledge in us, it would have to organise itself in our surface being and take possession there of the leading part. But in our surface being it is not the Intuition, it is the Reason which is organised and helps us to order our perceptions, thoughts and actions. Therefore the age of intuitive knowledge, represented by the early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads, had to give place to the age of rational knowledge; inspired Scripture made room for metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy had to give place to experimental Science. Intuitive thought which is a messenger from the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty, was supplanted by the pure reason which is only a sort of deputy and belongs to the middle heights of our being; pure reason in its turn was supplanted for a time by the mixed action of the reason which lives on our plains and lower elevations and does not in its view exceed the horizon of the experience that the physical mind and senses or such aids as we can invent for them can bring to us. And this process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress. For in each case the lower faculty is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher faculties. Without this succession and attempt at separate assimilation we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive domination of a part of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and unduly subjected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development. With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared.

We see this succession in the Upanishads and the subsequent Indian philosophies. The sages of the Veda and Vedanta relied entirely upon intuition and spiritual experience. It is by an error that scholars sometimes speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishad. Wherever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or the use of logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a comparison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous gives place to the more luminous, the narrower, faultier or less essential to the more comprehensive, more perfect, more essential. The question asked by one sage of another is “What dost thou know?”, not “What dost thou think?” nor “To what conclusion has thy reasoning arrived?” Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning urged in support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem to have held, must be corrected by a more perfect intuition; logical reasoning cannot be its judge.

And yet the human reason demands its own method of satisfaction. Therefore when the age of rationalistic speculation began, Indian philosophers, respectful of the heritage of the past, adopted a double attitude towards the Truth they sought. They recognised in the Sruti, the earlier results of Intuition or, as they preferred to call it, of inspired Revelation, an authority superior to Reason. But at the same time they started from Reason and tested the results it gave them, holding only those conclusions to be valid which were supported by the supreme authority. In this way they avoided to a certain extent the besetting sin of metaphysics, the tendency to battle in the clouds because it deals with words as if they were imperative facts instead of symbols which have always to be carefully scrutinised and brought back constantly to the sense of that which they represent. Their speculations tended at first to keep near at the centre to the highest and profoundest experience and proceeded with the united consent of the two great authorities, Reason and Intuition. Nevertheless, the natural trend of Reason to assert its own supremacy triumphed in effect over the theory of its subordination. Hence the rise of conflicting schools each of which founded itself in theory on the Veda and used its texts as a weapon against the others. For the highest intuitive Knowledge sees things in the whole, in the large and details only as sides of the indivisible whole; its tendency is towards immediate synthesis and the unity of knowledge. [LD 73‒76]

This brings me to the second significant passage concerning the three major Vedantic schools. While the first harked back to Shankara, the following harks farther back to Buddha, who lived during the 6th or 5th century BCE:

In in his approach to truth & his handling of truth, Buddha had not, so far, gone beyond the method of the Vedantic Rishis; Yajnavalkya or Pippalada would have so sought in themselves for the truth, received illumination in the same fashion, equally cast that knowledge into well-linked formulae of experience which could be lived and practised. But Yajnavalkya or Pippalada would not have shot the iron bolt of logic on the knowledge they had gained and shut themselves in a prison of ratiocination to the experiences of others and to fresh vision. It was here that, owing, perhaps, to the very strenuousness of Buddha’s search as well as to the limits of the question with which he had started, “How shall one escape from the pain & grief of the world,” he turned from the ancient path and allowed the metaphysical & logical training of his past [to] lay its heavy hand upon him. He built up walls of logic; he shut himself up in a creed. Thus it came about that this great destroyer of the ego sanctioned in his disciples the supreme act of intellectual egoism, and this giant render of chains imposed on his Sangha, without positively intending it, deprecating it indeed, the bondage to a single personality & the chain of a specific formula of thought. The movement of the metaphysical philosophies, more purely intellectual, far less temperamental & personal than the Buddha’s, yet followed the same limiting process. They obeyed not a personal illumination, but the logic of their starting point...

At this point Sri Aurobindo considers the example of the Samkhya philosophy as it is found in the late “speculative” Vedic hymns and the oldest prose Upanishads (8/9th ‒ 5th century BCE).

Still, it was from some fundamental experience or revelation that the metaphysicians started; the logical element intervened only as a second term of knowledge. Moreover, the method of the aphorism preserved the suggestive profundity of the intuition or revelatory experience & tended to maintain in the practice of knowledge the original closeness of the intellectual concept to that vision in the soul which thought can only translate very imperfectly to the reason. But about a thousand years later we find a new movement of the intellect in force, illustrated by the names of Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa, in which logic covers the whole field, leaving only a narrow corner to experience & intuition; but, for that very reason, the experience, the intuition assumes a character of much more eager intensity, exclusiveness, monotone of emphasis and steeps itself more fervently in the personality & temperament of the thinker. Hence a passion of dispute, an intolerance in logomachy which leaves far behind the measure of more ancient disputants. [17:573-74]

While the Vedanta schools engaged in debates over the nature of a largely static Absolute, another powerful stream of Indian thought, encompassing Kashmir Shaivism and Tantra, embraced a vision of the ultimate reality as inherently dynamic and creative. As one gleans from the following characterization of the Vedic gods, by the Veda itself, this vision was not entirely new:

Their conscious-force turned towards works and creation is possessed and guided by a perfect and direct knowledge of the thing to be done and its essence and its law — a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result. [LD 132‒33]

How was this vision lost? Sri Aurobindo explains:

Infinite consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed Truth or order of truths and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality. This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya.... It is by Maya that static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being — or, to put it in more metaphysical language, out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental play or the truth of Maya where the “each” and the “all” coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. The lower, present and deluding mental Maya has first to be embraced, then to be overcome; for it is God’s play with division and darkness and limitation, desire and strife and suffering in which He subjects Himself to the Force that has come out of Himself and by her obscure suffers Himself to be obscured. That other Maya concealed by this mental has to be overpassed, then embraced; for it is God’s play of the infinities of existence, the splendours of knowledge, the glories of force mastered and the ecstasies of love illimitable where He emerges out of the hold of Force, holds her instead and fulfils in her illumined that for which she went out from Him at the first. This distinction between the lower and the higher Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect. [LD 123‒24]

Maya in its original sense meant a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing, measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which outlines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make measurable the limitless. Later the word came from its original sense of knowledge, skill, intelligence to acquire a pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion, and it is in the figure of an enchantment or illusion that it is used by the philosophical systems. [LD 109]

Kashmir Shaivism and Tantra picked up on and restored (some of) the original sense of Māyā. Kashmir Shaivism is a non-dualistic philosophical system that flourished in Kashmir from the 9th century CE onwards. In it the Absolute, Paramaśiva, is understood as a perfect, indivisible unity of two aspects. The first aspect, Prakāśa, is a pure, static, contentless consciousness and the unmanifest ground of all being. The second, Vimarśa, is the dynamic aspect of consciousness and the source of all creation. While Kashmir Shaivism explicitly equates the ultimate reality of Paramaśiva with the Vedantic existence-consciousness-bliss, its signal contribution is the emphasis on Vimarśa as being inseparable from and co-equal with Prakāśa. Creation is therefore not an illusion or a fall from grace, but the joyful, spontaneous, and free self-expression of this pulsating, blissful consciousness. The spiritual goal is then not merely liberation from the world, but the liberation of the world, realizing it as one’s own divine play.

Nothing I could write in a few words or paragraphs could possibly do justice to the diverse Tantric traditions. To mark their place on the journey of Sachchidānanda through the vast expanse of Indian philosophy, the best I can do is quote the following passage from Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita:

The [Bhagavad] Gita starts from [the] Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means and powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal. There is yet another, the Tantric, which though less subtle and spiritually profound, is even more bold and forceful than the synthesis of the Gita, for it seizes even upon the obstacles to the spiritual life and compels them to become the means for a richer spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole of Life in our divine scope as the Lila [cosmic play] of the Divine; and in some directions it is more immediately rich and fruitful, for it brings forward into the foreground along with divine knowledge, divine works and an enriched devotion of divine Love, the secrets also of the Hatha and Raja Yogas, the use of the body and of mental askesis for the opening up of the divine life on all its planes, to which the Gita gives only a passing and perfunctory attention. Moreover it grasps at that idea of the divine perfectibility of man, possessed by the Vedic Rishis but thrown into the background by the intermediate ages, which is destined to fill so large a place in any future synthesis of human thought, experience and aspiration. [19:9‒10]

To readers of Aurocafe, the contrast between the principal method of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and that of Tantric Yogas might be of particular interest. In Sri Aurobindo’s words:

In two directions [Tantric discipline] enlarges by its synthetic turn the province of the Yogic method. First, it lays its hand firmly on many of the main springs of human quality, desire, action and it subjects them to an intensive discipline with the soul’s mastery of its motives as a first aim and their elevation to a diviner spiritual level as its final utility. Again, it includes in its objects of Yoga not only liberation, which is the one all-mastering preoccupation of the specific systems, but a cosmic enjoyment of the power of the Spirit, which the others may take incidentally on the way, in part, casually, but avoid making a motive or object. It is a bolder and larger system.

In the method of synthesis which we have been following, another clue of principle has been pursued which is derived from another view of the possibilities of Yoga. This starts from the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra. In the Tantric method Shakti is all-important, becomes the key to the finding of spirit; in this synthesis spirit, soul is all-important, becomes the secret of the taking up of Shakti. The Tantric method starts from the bottom and grades the ladder of ascent upwards to the summit; therefore its initial stress is upon the action of the awakened Shakti in the nervous system of the body and its centres; the opening of the six lotuses is the opening up of the ranges of the power of Spirit. Our synthesis takes man as a spirit in mind much more than a spirit in body and assumes in him the capacity to begin on that level, to spiritualise his being by the power of the soul in mind opening itself directly to a higher spiritual force and being and to perfect by that higher force so possessed and brought into action the whole of his nature. For that reason our initial stress has fallen upon the utilisation of the powers of soul in mind and the turning of the triple key of knowledge, works and love in the locks of the spirit.... To arrive by the shortest way at the largest development of spiritual power and being and divinise by it a liberated nature in the whole range of human living is our inspiring motive. [SY 612‒13]