Examine the phenomenology of the Chandogya Upanishad

The 108 canonical Upanishads propounded by the Muktika Upanishad are famous for their
depth and aesthetic potential. The tradition of Shaktism sees them as endorsing the
subsuming of metaphysics under a ‘feminine principle’ embodied in the goddess Devi. Even
more strikingly, the Vedanta tradition has elicited from them monism, substance dualism,
theism, and panentheism, in addition to an superabundance of conjectures about the nature of
being too numerous to list in a single paper. All in all, one cannot begrudge the Upanishads
their ability, entirely absent from canonical Western sacred texts, to serve as fertile ground
for the organic growth of entirely separate strands of metaphysical thought and speculation.
Perhaps the most cryptic of all the Upanishads, however, is the sixth – the Chandogya
Upanishad. As Witz notes, ‘the opulence of its chapters is difficult to communicate: the most
diverse aspects of the universe, life, mind and experience are developed into inner paths [...]
Chapters VI-VII consist of vidyas of great depth and profundity’. Moreover, it has inspired
philosophers as diverse as Schopenhauer (who endowed the motif ‘Tat tvam asi’ – ‘this art
thou’1 – with critical significance in his World as Will and Representation) and Arapura (who
saw it as a text concerned predominately with the nature of language) in the development of
their systematic theses. Perhaps the most profound insights of the Chandogya Upanishad,
however, are essentially phenomenological in nature – and it is these that this essay will set
out to contextualise, explicate, and develop.

Heidegger is famous, most of all, as the author of Being and Time. BT is essentially secular in
nature: that is to say, it is a philosophical text interspersed with Christian perorations rather
than a philosophical extension of a theological argument. It is perhaps because of BT’s non-
theistic tilt that the phenomenological tradition it spawned has tended (albeit not exclusively)
to focus more on philosophical analysis of the structure of Being than on the religious
propositions which entangle themselves with it. Nevertheless, BT was by no means the
beginning and end of Heidegger’s output. His 1919-1921 lectures, ‘On the Phenomenology of
Religion’, describe his vision of what the Christian experience could and ought to be. But
they also contain a broader theory of religion, seeing it as ‘a cultural form that alters the most
basic patterns of our experience of the world in such a way that it reorients our sense of
identity, values, and behaviour.’ In addition to this, they contain a revolutionary ‘schematic
structure’ of reading which seeks ‘to penetrate therewith into the grounding phenomena of
primordial religious life’ (Frazier, 367). We can, of course, profitably apply both his
phenomenology and his critical theory to the Chandogya Upanishad, with the result that it
ceases to be a text atomised into a set of incomplete systematic theses (as is the tendency of
literary critics of the Upanishads) and becomes instead a lush, organic exaltation of religion’s
ability to reorient the subject’s relations to phenomena, the finite, and the divine.

The sixth chapter of the CU is presented through the medium of conversation between a
father and his ‘swollen-headed’ son. His son, just having returned from 12 years’ study, is
keen to demonstrate to his father his mastery of Being – but his father, of course, is not
convinced, seeing the goal of religious practice not being to replicate propositions in the mind
but actively to transform the structures of perception: ‘You must have surely asked about that
teaching by which one hears what has not been heard of before, thinks of what has not been
thought of before, and perceives what has not been perceived before? (CU, 6.1.3) In part, this
reflects the beginning of the Yogic culture in which knowledge and self-knowledge were
1
The phrase Tat tvam asi is widely regarded as the distillation of the Upanishads’ teaching and is a dominant
theme in their subsequent commentaries. The Chandogya Upanishad uses it more than any other canonical
Upanishad, for a total of nine times: cf. Gupta, 1962
regarded as the critical element of salvation, such that one who achieves Moksha does so by
virtue of becoming part of the universal fabric of reality – in effect, becoming one with the
truth. More importantly than this, however, it also suggests that the teachings of the CU
themselves facilitate religious enlightenment not by filling the mind with logical propositions
about the nature of the universe but by encouraging a wholesale restructuring of our
cognitions to focus on the broad, continuous structures of experience rather than the
contingent appearances of the perceptive imagination.

In this sense, the CU aims for a phenomenological transformation akin to that articulated by
Heidegger when he speaks of ‘changing the fundamental religious experience’ in terms of
how the concept of ‘I-ness’ situates the world in the particular to the detriment of the
universal (PRL, 51/64). Heidegger’s project, however, was much more than purely
philosophical in nature. The PRL sought, in much the same way as the sociological texts of
Durkheim and Barth, to establish a definition of religion in its most ‘primitive’ form. Unlike
the aforementioned, however, Heidegger ascertained that the defining-feature of religion is its
phenomenological slant rather than its authority to promote social cohesion: ‘it is not merely
particular practices or beliefs, nor a particular perception that many religions seek to create,
but a whole disposition toward the world, rooted in a particular structure, mood, or
interpretive orientation in the way we experience things’ (Frazier, 368). To Heidegger, the
letters of Paul, as the CU, aimed to restructure subjectivity so as to elevate the individual
above the quotidian concerns of Paul’s ‘unbelievers’ and the CU’s ‘ignorant men’.
Nevertheless, there is a key difference which distinguishes the two texts and the traditions
which entail them. Heidegger understood ‘authentic Christianity’ as Christianity which made
the Divine a limit of thought – the limit of experience in Dasein – but never an object of
perception. In the CU, however, we find the beginnings of a tendency in Hinduism which
sought to make the Divine continuous with the material world, such that the task set to the
believer is to elicit universal truths from benign empirical particulars. Heidegger, surely,
would have levelled the same charge at the authors of the CU as he did at the Christian
mystics, namely that they ‘lose themselves in ‘the matter at issue’, the material’, and ‘the
universal” (Pattinson and Kirkpatrick, 54). However, these authors would likely accuse him
in return of neglecting the untapped potentialities latent in his understanding of Dasein. It is
undoubtable, in short, that the marked contrast between the phenomenological imperative of
the CU – to turn our actions away from strict ‘I-ness’ to become part of the universal flow of
truth and divinity – and the phenomenology of the Christian scriptures reveals, and in part
explicates, its hidden potential for perceptual transformation.

There is more to the phenomenology of the CU, however, than can be expressed strictly in
terms of Heideggerean thought. On the CU’s account, all souls are linked by means of their
common substance: ‘The inmost essence of all beings is same, the whole world is One Truth,
One Reality, One Soul’ (CU 6.8). If we are to understand the particular, the world of
appearances, as the deficient domain of the ‘ignorant’, and accordingly to regard the
universal Truth-matter-soul continuum as an emanation of the divine, it is clear that the
individual soul is naturally closer to the Gods than the appearances of the quotidian.
Moreover, since it is by becoming and inhabiting the truth that we achieve moksha, it seems
that the CU presupposes the primacy of one sort of phenomenological perception (that which
is oriented to observing wisdom in general patterns) over another (that which conceives of
appearances as unconnected both from each other and from the infinite substance that
manifests them). To the CU, the connection of a class of objects to its infinite point of origin
is evinced not by their individual forms but by their common features: ‘The various objects
produced from these materials do not change the essence, they change the form. Thus, to
understand something, studying the essence of one is the path to understanding the numerous
manifested forms’ (Duessen, 162-172). As a whole, then, the CU’s phenomenology rests on a
highly distinctive metaphysical dialectic: that of ‘appearance’, how an object seems taken
entirely as a thing-in-itself, in conflict with ‘reality’, which is accessed by comparative
discursive thought and reveals the ‘essence’ of objects held in common with their ontological
category.

The phenomenology of the CU is not, however, a purely philosophical curiosity. For one, if
human affect is ‘objective’, in that it supervenes reflexively and without conscious focus, do
we have any reason to regard it as being different from the lumps of gold, copper, and clay in
CU 6.2? Does it not therefore follow that sadness, pain, grief (in short, the longing for
appearances which have either died in their corporeal bodies or slipped from the limits of our
direct perception) are simply transient, to be regarded not as convulsions of the soul but as
emergent properties of human life connected essentially to Om? It is thus that the CU is the
progenitor not only of Vedanta but of the self-transcending Yogic and Ascetic movements.
Moreover, if learning itself is the goal of salvation, the CU’s implicit soteriology can be said
not to focus on any putative future events but on active self-transformation: the son, the
diegetic parallel of the reader, is enlightened precisely because he comes to see the
omnipresent realm of things which survive their contingent forms. Frazier identifies four
steps of an attitudinal journey accordingly:

‘We can see things in terms of the broader principles that they instantiate. These principles
are both actual and potential (one can know what has not been seen through them, etc.) so
that when one sees the world as ‘clay, iron and gold’ it is really the universals that one learns
to perceive […] A new model explaining contingent phenomena as the evolved manifestation
of more basic principles invites us to see particular forms (rupa) as the sign of an underlying
evolving substrate […] We are invited to see becoming as an arising out of that substrate and
ending as a return. All things become inferential signs of the divine […] The examples are
turned back upon the human person: We can reorient ourselves like the un-blindfolded man,
merge our faculties back into the substrate, and knowing and embodying Brahman, we can
become it as an honest man becomes an instance of truth.’ (Frazier, 16)

Frazier is undoubtedly strong on the formal connection of man to Brahman – that is to say,
the process by which man becomes connected to Brahman by acknowledging the rootedness
of his corporeal form in its creative process. However, the phenomenological implications of
the CU seem to extend further still than she identifies. It has been traditional – paradigmatic,
even – for religions to focus on moral guidance as opposed to aesthetic exploration.
Nevertheless, in the CU’s idea of man being like the ‘buds connected to a root’, there arises a
notion of organic development not unlike that embodied in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of
the ‘rhizome’; man ceases to be linear, concerned with arboreal movement from one
appearance to another, and instead immerses himself in the natural root-system which draws
all things together and unites them under a common aesthetic goal. Indeed, it is this organic
quality which makes the CU so strong on phenomenological explication and guidance. Were
the text structured as a linear narrative or a pure monologue, its implications would not shine
through as clearly as they do in the muddled, evocative arena of direct discourse.
Furthermore, the phenomenological implications of the CU impose themselves on morality
and ethics as well as philosophical logic. All in all, the CU charges us to bathe in its teaching
in much the same way as the diegetic son does in the teaching of his father. It is perhaps this
circularity, this philosophical harmony, which makes it in no small part a deeply compelling
and influential theological text.