Sankara on the Necessity and Nature of Intelligent Creation

In Sankara's introduction to the Vedanta Sutras, he makes the following statement, "For the complete comprehension of Brahman is the highest end of man, since it destroys the root of all evil such as Nescience, the seed of the entire Samsara." (p.14) Sankara claims that reality is One, and that the root of all evil lies in the appropriation of the attributes of things and their false application to other things. This prevents us from realizing the reality and nature of our own connection to Brahman, and encourages the alienation from Brahman which derives its power not just from the subject/object distinction but the false unity of the subject and object as well. In this paper, I will attempt to lay out the salient points of Sankara's doctrine of intelligent creation, particularly an exposition of the saguna Brahman with regard to the necessary and sufficient nature of intelligent causation. Next, Sankara's criticism of the positions of the schools of Sankya and on the question will be outlined. This paper will endeavor to show that Sankara contends that intelligent causation is both the necessary and sufficient cause of the world, and that he makes this claim in order to avoid denying his primary philosophical position, namely that of non-dualism. I will also make some critical comments on the issues he raises after my exposition.

I. Sankara and Saguna Brahman

Sankara takes up the problem of the one and the many, or universals vs. particulars in his Introduction in an attempt to resolve the nature of reality. In his efforts to do just that, he establishes a difference between Nirguna and Saguna Brahman. While Nirguna Brahman is the reality of Brahman in all its unknowableness, Saguna Brahman is the experience of Brahman which is manifested in the world, the way in which Brahman can be described to us. Sankara asserts that such is the case. If it is not the case that Brahman can be known at all, then the Scripture would hardly serve as a guide to our search. Sankara offers an argument (not simply an appeal to the Sutra's authority) to the effect that if we conceive of Brahman as that which has all power, goodness, etc., we can see its existence in two ways. First, the name "Brahman," deriving as it does from the word "brih" 'to be great," signifies that which we hold to be the highest in existence. Secondly, Brahman is known through its function of being the Self of "every one." Since everyone is self-conscious and does not think "I am not," we can safely say that there is a substrate of existence whereby the "I" is represented and which is discoverable through the process of enquiry.

This is the function of Saguna Brahman, the state of being of Brahman-with-categories. (Deutsch, p. 13) As such, it is the locus of creation, with the following characteristics:

(Brahman is that) from which the origin, etc., (i.e. the origin, subsistence, and dissolution) of this (world proceed).

Finally, Sankara holds that the characteristic of omniscience found in Brahman is found in the third Sutra:

(The omniscience of Brahman follows) from its being the source of Scripture

The question arises, "To just what does the term saguna Brahman refer?" We must keep in mind that it is not ontologically distinguishable from nirguna Brahmin. In Sutra 4, a dilemma is set up between the action of the Scriptures and the 'passivity' of Brahman. If it refers to action, then it cannot refer to "accomplished existing things." (i.e. it cannot set us upon the path to Brahman) If it does not refer to action, we are left with the inability to come to a knowledge of the existence of Ultimate Reality. This dichotomy must be resolved by postulating that in creating the world, Brahman expresses certain characteristics which coincide with what we humans regard as rationality. As part of the unitary nature of Brahman, it must not be thought of as being separate or distinct from any other aspect of Brahman's being. It's "unqualified oneness" transcends all possible experience, and is inexpressible. (Deutsch, p. 11-12) Saguna Brahman must therefore be viewed as a phenomenological description of Ultimate Reality insofar as it is the undifferentiated source of genuine existence. (Bahm, p. 135)

Sankara also emphasizes the necessity for regarding any effect as pre-existing in it's cause. Without such a necessary pre-existing link, the connection between cause and effect becomes occult. Our experience of the world teaches us that in order to produce the desired effects of intelligent action, we must obtain the materials which exhibit the necessary qualities for their production. Only in this manner can we obtain results. A glassblower does not use clay in his production of vessels, anymore than a potter uses sand to form his pots. (Sankara, p. 334-342) It is also the case that such a denial of the pre-existence of the cause in the effect results in the establishment of an infinite regression of causation. Since the effect exists externally to the cause, and nothing has both cause and effect within it as a unity, then there must always be an infinite chain of causation to explain any existent object. (Deutsch, p.36) This aspect of Sankara's philosophy explains the assertion of the necessary and sufficient character of saguna Brahman's role as creator of the world. If the event pre-exists in the cause, then the world must pre-exist in Brahman, and any denial of this is a total denial of the role of Brahman in creation as far as Sankara is concerned.

Sankara cannot take refuge in metaphysical agnosticism or dualism, and must refute it where ever he sees it being appealed to, in either Scriptural or non-Scriptural Indian systems. His task is to provide an account of the basis of reality in a manner which reconciles the demands of our existence with the authority of Scripture. (Basham, pp. 109 10) In order to promote his monistic project, he must postulate that intelligence [as expressed in saguna Brahman] is both sufficient and necessary for creation. going to have to give a self-consistent account of the problems of differentiation in the other schools, one which shows that they fail to satisfy our experience of unity, while at the same time not explicating the apparent differences between "objects" in a manner which does justice to human action. The difficulty that he will have to wrestle with, at least from his own philosophical perspective, is how to refute what he takes to be the dualism of the primary schools of Indian philosophy. We will consider two of these schools, Sankhya and Vaiseshikan atomism.

II. Sankara's Refutation of the Schools

Sankara, in his commentary on the Sutras, goes to great lengths to refute the notion that unintelligent causes produce intelligent effects. This is most noticable in his attempts at refuting the Sankhya system, since he claims that it destroys the notion that Reality is based upon the ultimately Rational. By seperating the source of consciousness from the locus of existence, the Sankhyas assert that a non-intelligent being brings into existence objects capable of serving intelligent beings (coaches, houses, etc.) without intelligent help. In contrast to this, Sankara is apparently making an appeal to some notion of anthropic principle. He rejects any assumption of a "blind watchmaker," and affirms the necessity of design and purpose in the cosmos. He does this by referring to the immense complexity of the world, such that the greatest workmen cannot conceive of it in its entirety. He also claims that formal causation is no less a part of empirical reality than material causation, and the first cause of the world, in order to be comprehensible, must have both formal and material aspects. Sankara extends this attack on alleged non-rational emergent properties to the atomism of the Vaiseshikas. Sankara bends his promise here by indulging in appeals to the Scriptural authority of his position, but recovers nicely by illustrating that pleasure, pain and dullness are not capable of being attributed to both inner and outer sensations. Given this, and also that the effects of these sensations vary from person to person, and that the three constituents of the pradhana are affected and caused by antecedent causes, indicating their limitation, it seems that these three qualities are not the source of perfect knowledge about ultimate Reality.

Sankara affirms that the denial of activity in the object is neither the aim of his argument or a genuine reductio ad absurdum of his position. He acknowledges the locus of the activity in the object, but claims that the origination of the action lies outside of the object and within the intelligent individual. This is seen by the fact that these activities only take place in conjunction with intelligent bodies and never apart from them. Sankara points out the case of the magnet and the color spectrum, who, although they do not possess movement in and of themselves, incite movement in other objects. Likewise, Brahman, the creator of the world, does not move, yet sets into effect all motion. Thus we see that the intelligent first cause notion explains motion better than the non-intelligent first cause.

In Sankara's introduction to the Second Chapter, Second Section, he takes the tack of restricting himself solely to rational refutation of the positions of his opponents, especially Samkhya. To the possible objection that his duty is to establish his school and its teachings in order to pursue the unchallenged goal of perfect knowledge which is the aim of all the schools, but not to refute the opinions of others, he answers by saying that it is the case that the other schools have established themselves in the minds of those of "inferior intelligence" as being the prerequisites of perfect knowledge. Since they have been subscribed to by learned men, bolstered with "abstruse arguments," and have a "weighty appearance," it is incumbent upon the critic of these systems to show the inherent fallibility of opposing schools.

It is not enough to show that their appropriation of the Scriptures is false, Sankara must also show that they are irrational as well. He first starts in on his old foes, the Sankhyas. and presents the following argument, which he attributes to them:

1) "Just as jars, dishes, and other products which possess the common quality of consisting of clay are seen to have for their cause clay in general; so we must suppose that all the outward and inward (i.e. inanimate and animate) effects which are endowed with the characteristics of pleasure, pain and dulness have for their causes pleasure pain and dulness in general." (p. 364)

2) Pleasure, pain and dullness in their universal application comprise the threefold-aspected pradhana.

3) The pradhana evolves without conscious influence into the various manifestations of the world, including the various manifestations of conscious intentionality.

4) The existence of the pradhana is deduced from the fact of the "limitation of all effects," and other considerations.

To allow for an independent and "unconscious" (acetana) material cause (pradhana) is to allow independent existence to something other than Brahman ontologically, and, even more than that, is to allow for a means of knowing (namely, pramana as anumana or "inference") independent of sruti on the level of the highest truth (samyag darsana) epistemologically speaking. In other words, according to Sankara, reasoning is incompetent to fathom the highest truth... (Larson, p. 215

The three gunas, now out of balance, vary in status and thus produce effects which differ on the basis of the superiority vs. inferiority of the gunas relative to one another. In response to Sankara's re-statement of intelligent control of the world and its effects, the Sankhyas respond as follows:

1) We do not observe the activity of mere intelligent beings.

2) We have a choice between asserting that activity is located in the active thing (the Sankhya notion) or in the conjunction of observer and observed.

3) In the conjunction of intelligent and non-intelligent objects, it is the non-intelligent object which is credited with action.

4) Therefore, the locus of activity is not found either in the observer/observed relationship or the combination of intelligent beings and non-intelligent objects, but in the object alone.

To this, Sankara counters that the effect must be seen to pre-exist in the cause. If not, grass eaten by bulls or left in the fields would become milk, not just grass eaten by cows. The fact that human beings cannot produce milk at will is no disproof of such causation, divine action is necessary to explain some causes. In any case, humans, through the amount and quality of feed they give a cow, can vary the milk that they get from her, thus disproving once again the Sankhya's hasty generalization. How can it be that the interplay of the gunas leads to purported action on behalf of mankind? We have seen that the pradhana of the Samkhya school is a precise denial of the necessary and sufficient unity of any intelligent direction of the world, there is no connecting rationality that can mediate between the non rational cause and the "rational" effect.

The gunas, being essentially independent of each other, cannot even exist in a state of mutual interdependence to create the world, since their chief characteristic is absolute independence. And, due to the fact that there is no overriding rational factor at work to bring them together anyway, it can never be said that they form to create the world in any combination.

The Sankhyan may claim, "I do not mean by my doctrine that it is the case that all of the gunas activities are found to be of this immutable nature. We make an inductive inference from the changing condition of things in the world to the actual character of the gunas themselves. In doing so, we see that it is the case that they must indeed be unstable and mutable in some respects, in order for these changes to be produced. Therefore, there must be some way in which all three of the gunas 'are able to enter into the relation of mutual inequality,' especially when they are balanced one against the other."

To this, Sankara claims that the objections he made earlier remain in force due to the lack of necessary intelligence of the pradhana previously mentioned. In virtually all of these examples, the assumption of intelligence underlies the activities mentioned. If the Sankhyas wish to admit this linkage, then they would cease to be antagonistic, since the only rational and Scriptural course open to them would be the adoption of Vedanta. If they still want to assert the interdependence and equality of the gunas, they have to account for how the production of any effect can come from static relationships, and their examples haven't illustrated this.

Sankara asserts that it is impossible to believe in the doctrines of Sankhya due to their contradictory nature. In this case, we would see that the senses cannot be enumerated with any accuracy. It also is the case that Scripture and the Authoritative Teaching reject their doctrine, so we must conclude that there is no need to accept their conclusions or fear that we have missed the truth by rejecting their doctrine.

Is Sankara's assessment of Samkya fair? Although we do not have any Samkya texts which refute Sankara directly, the following points have be made in its defense by Larson: 1) Sankara has made an elemental mistake in his attack on the Samkhya notion of pradhana. Pradhana is not like a stone or clod of earth. While Samkhya agrees with Sankara that the existence of the empirical world of distinctions points to an ultimate material cause, that ultimate material cause is not necessarily similiar in quality to a stone or dish, hence Sankara's argument from analogy fails. In any case, Sankara has failed to make his case on a far deeper level, since his assumption that Samkhya demands a dualism of mind and body or even subject and object is fallacious. Pradhana in the Samkhyan system encompasses a unity of mind and body on a level of reductive materialism. Intelligence, self-will and self awareness, and the gross objects of the material world all stem from pradhana. Consciousness is distinct from awareness in Samkhya, yet it is necessarily linked with the self-aware mind in order to have more than a formal expression.

2) Gunas are not qualities in Samkhyan thought. While it is true that this is the case in other schools, the Samkhyan insistence on pradhana as reductive materialism shows that the gunas are transitory states, not invarient categories as Sankara's straw-man assessment would have them be. Samkhyans are not naive realists, and Sankara's attempt to pit such "categories" against the flux of experience fails. 3) The equilibrium of the gunas is another false charge brought against the Samkhyans. There is no temporal beginning of the universe in the school's cosmology (as Sankara also contends), therefore no time in which the interplay of purusa and pradhana is non-existent. Sankara condemns himself here. 4) "Purpose" is a metaphorical term for both Sankara and Samkhya, therefore Sankara cannot use its employment by the Samkhyan school as an example of their affirming that Brahmanis the cause of suffering.

5) Finally, Sankara's criticism of Samkhya on the grounds of the relation of between purusa and pakrti has merit, since the classical school insists that the only linkage between the two is "sheer presence." (saksitva) This gives Sankara a justifiable complaint against them on the grounds that such a "union" can scarcely account for the differentiation between these two concepts. It may be possible to reconcile the separation of the two on other grounds, but Sankara has justifiable objections here, and is not the only commentator to have raised them. (Larson, p. 222-234).

In Sankara's discussion of the the necessity of intelligent creation, it becomes necessary for him to attack the atomism of the Vaiseshika school. The Vaiseshikas thus make the non-conscious principle of atomism supreme in their philosophy. Sankara claims that this is contrary to both Scripture and reason. It denies Scripture, since it makes non conscious atoms the primary source of all empirical "reality," rather than the conscious Brahman of the Scriptures. Although the Vaiseshikas try to reconcile the two by appealing to the (supposedly) non-conscious phenomenon of pradhana as a justification for their views, Sankara is as unsympathetic to this move as he was to the Sankhyas' attempt to make pradhana an abstract non-conscious creative principle.

In refuting them on rational grounds, Sankara takes up the notion of the conjunction of atoms as producers of qualities of objects and finds it wanting. This really isn't even the way in which Vaiseshikas postulate such combinations. Their view involves dyads which grow into triads and quatrads. Given this combination, it should be no stretch for a conscious Brahman to produce non-conscious objects. If the Vaiseshikas respond that effected substances (the binary compounds) possess extended qualities which are in contradiction to their causes, the reason for the difference is found in a positive negation of the cause. This being the case, and since there could be nothing within the world to contradict Advaita Vedanta's so-called intelligent Brahman, Sankara is left unable to explain why intelligent causation produces unintelligent effects.

To this, Sankara responds that the Vaiseshikas are guilty of self-contradiction. If we are to take their notion of effects being separate from the cause seriously, then the so-called contradictions between cause and effect are illusory, since in the act of creation the cause empties itself out into the effect, and then the two are no longer connected to one another, indeed the effect must exist without qualities, at least temporarily. Thus, even if the basis for the qualities lie in multiplicity, it is still the case that they are related by inheritance, due to the fact that there can be no other way for the connections to work, given that since they are contacts and not substances, there is still no real continuity between cause and effect.

He questions the doctrine of atomism since the Vaiseshikas thus make the non-conscious principle of atomism supreme in their philosophy. Sankara claims that this is contrary to both Scripture and reason. It denies Scripture, since it makes non-conscious atoms the primary source of all empirical "reality," rather than the conscious Brahman of the Scriptures.

Given that the first movement of atoms is caused by the unseen principle (adrsta) following pralaya, this in turn causes the differentiation of atoms into different combinations of qualities. Sankara rejects this on the same grounds that he rejects the Samkhya doctrine, namely that

...a non-intelligent thing which is not directed by an intelligent principle cannot of itself either act or be the cause of action. (Sankara, p. 388)

The atomistic view also leads us into a vicious cycle of eternal regression, due to the fact that it is in no way possible to get these combinations without preceding combinations as a basis. (given that effects and causes are different and independent of each other). Also, given the monadic nature of atomism, how are we to understand similarity and difference? Any relations must be functions of those things which relate, yet on the atomistic account this is not possible! Finally, one substance may undergo a formal transformation to another substance without a change in parts, (water to ice, for example).

Sankara finds the doctrines of Vaiseshikan atomism untenable. In its place, he reasserts his project of showing the non-dual nature of reality by examining the implications inherent in his opponent's positions.

Once again, we are driven to ask, "Is Sankara being fair?" Here it seems that his criticisms bear more fruit than in the case of Samkhya. The Vaiseshikans were driven to accept the notion of an intelligent God as upholder of the unity of atoms when it became evident that their non-theistic atomic theory could not account for the continued unity of "the disjecta membra of the world." (Radhakrishnan, Vol. 2, p. 227) Yet, one cannot help but feel that the Vaiseshikan, like the Sankhyan, could make the counter-charge of false analogy against Sankara's notion of likening the creative action of Brahman to the specific action of a potter making clay, insofar as it is the case that such a creation assumes a potential for differentiation that seemingly should not possible in Brahman as it is in the phenomenal world, even given the concept of saguna Brahman.

III. Conclusion

For the reasons given above, Sankara asserts the anthropic principle and denies the possibility of non intelligent causation. He stoutly opposes any notion of emergent properties as both anti-empirical and anti-rational, instead holding to a notion of intelligent design. In this, I agree with his contentions. Without a previously existing schema, it is difficult to understand how "emergent properties" are any less occult than the notion of intelligent creation. While this is the case, I find that Sankara's affirmation of the atemporal creation of the universe to be unsound, and his attempt at avoiding the problem of evil by positing a "sportive" notion of creation to be an ad hoc addition to his theory of creation, in order to avoid the necessary association of evil with nirguna Brahman that his non-dualism would necessarily entail. That being said, I concur with the general tenor of his linkage of the necessary and sufficient nature of intelligent creation.

However, I feel that he has been less than successful in dealing with the questions raised by the Sankhya and Vaiseshika schools. Unlike an Aristotle or Aquinas, Sankara is not particularly apt or charitable in his assessment of his opposition, a trait all too common in Western philosophy as well. Unless his followers deal with the genuine root issues of disagreement between Vedanta and the other schools, the Advaitan project of non-dualism is left open to severe criticism.

Works Cited

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