mnkbdky

According to the Upanishads Brahma is asanga. Asanga is the concept that Brahma is "beyond the region of negation." He is completely unrelated to anything, he transcends the universe and is perfectly self-sufficient. God is the ultimate aseitic, he is that being which has his being a se. The Indian Christian theologian Brahmabandhab Upadhyay takes the Indian concept of asanga and attempts to reconcile it with the Thomistic concept of the Christian God by employing a distinction that was made between Nirguna Brahma and Saguna Brahma in Sankara's advaita vedanta.

In doing this, however, Brahmabandhab runs the risk of making the highest nature of God impersonal. Brahmabandhab attempts to reconcile this problem by making the distinction between God's necessary (pramarthika) and contingent (vyavaharika) properties. He does this by exhorting those who have misunderstood nirguna as meaning an impersonal, abstract and unconscious Being. He contends, rather, that nirguna only refers to those qualities or properties belonging to Brahma that are necessary. That is, nirguna are the essential properties of God, they are his necessary essence. He then states that creation is not a necessary property of Brahma. Brahma need not create necessarily. Rather, creation is something that is contingent, and therefore, God is not necessarily related to creation.

It should be noted that there is a difference between the statement, 1) "Necessarily, God is related to creation"; which says that there is no possible world in which God is not related to some creation, creation and God exist necessarily side by side from all eternity with God always already sustaining it, and 2) God is related to creation necessarily, which simply states that if God were to create then he would be needed to sustain his creation. It is the former which is being denied here.

The conclusion Brahmabandhab draws is, that since a guna is a property that restricts or restrains something and thereby forces the one who has them into pain and pleasure due to either attraction of aversion that it is perfectly appropriate for a Christian to refer to God as nir-guna--without guna--because Brahma in his essential properties remains uneffected by his creation. He is neither compelled to create, but does so out of his loving will; nor is he obligated to sustain his creation, but again does so out of his loving will. Succinctly, nirguna for Brahmabandhab means that God's essential nature is--or necessary properties are--not effected or necesarily related to anything. God is completely unrelated or asanga.

For those of you who are familiar with Sankara's advaita vedanta, tell me what you thing think of his interpretation of nirguna Brahma.

Does it work?

Are there Vedic passages that you believe contradict his interpretation?

Do you think Sankara would have austerely anathematize him?

What are you thoughts?

Thanks,

-- mnkbdky

hinduwoman

This is a new interpretation, it seems to me.
Nirguna has always meant that Brhaman is without any attributes or property or form. It is only when he becomes saguna, that he can be said to have any qualities.

Amit Misra

My guess is that the Adi Sankara would have disagreed with the Rev. Pt. Upadhyaya had he been around. If I were to attempt the kind of sophistry that Advaitins get up to, here's what I would try.
The famous nasadiya sutra tells us that before creation (srsti) there 'was' a nothingness. BTW, this nothingness is supposed to be different from Sartre's 'absence-of-being' : even "what was it that was not?" is questioned in the sutra.
Then there is a hiatus of sorts till Hiranyagarbha got up to some monkey business. I forget the reference, but it seems that Brahma was "afraid" and asked what there was to be afraid of, he was 'hungry' and therefore created food and a means of eating the food, and so on. Anyways, he sort of broke the singularity and collaborated with Maya to undertake srsti.
I may be terribly mistaken, but this denies the posited difference between a paramarth and a vyavahara aspects of brahma. Brahma is creating as a contingency, in response to suo motto factors like fear, hunger, etc.
The argument then is that prior to the breaking of the singularity, brahma is asanga. Attribute is born as a result of Maya's contribution to the process of srsti.
The Book of Genesis, however, tells us that God created man in his own image. The possession of an image is an attribute, and so is, sensu strictu, an act, such as that of creation.
The Christian God, therefore, is saguna, at least from the stage of Fiat Lux... Earlier on, when 'In the begining was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God' (or words(!) to that effect), the bible loses out to the asanga brahma by stating that the word was in the beginning.

Yah! My Brahma is even more non-existent than your God! Brzrrzrzrrp

The need to reconcile nirguna with bhakti is probably what prompts Upadhyaya's analysis, IMHO. The philosophical nirguna has nothing to do with the purely emotional response to divinity that is embodied in bhakti and abrahamic religions. Bhakti poetry satirizes nirguna unashamedly, for instance, in Surdasa's hilarious treatment of Udhava, whom Krsna sends to preach nirguna bhakti to the gopis of vrndavana. Since "love" and "prayer" are so strongly emphasised in christianity (as in the bhakti tradition), Upadhyaya probably saw some kind of necessity to associate love and prayer and pleasure and pain with Brahma. Finding the chap asanga, he proceeded to ascribe attributes justified as 'necessary' to him, and then, to come to a full circle, invoked old YHWH as a necessary good!
Doesn't work.
Amit

paul30

I had always thought that the major living Western religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam--are dualistic; whereas the major Eastern ones--Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism--are non-dualistic.

In dualistic religions, God is completely separate from and different from the creation or the universe. God may affect it; but it cannot affect God. (Also in dualistic religions, there are lots of irreconcilable opposites: good is radically and irremediably different from evil; one person is absolutely and indissolubly different from another; etc. etc.)

In non-dualistic religions, any separation between God/Brahman and the world is illusory. Likewise illusory is the perception of individuality--our separateness from each other is an illusion. All actions have consequences; but badness and goodness belong only to human (imperfect) perception; to God all things are good.