SmartSurat  #  Hinduism

Theism in the Upanisads

What we have in the Upanisads is a move away from the polytheism of the Vedas to a concept of the non-duality and non-plurality of the world - a concept of oneness, of monism. While most would accept that a monistic belief system is the overriding message of the Upanisads, there are some Upanisads in which the move towards the conception of deity on a more personal, theistic basis is evident. In particular, the Svetasvatara Upanisad extols Rudra-Siva as the transcendent God and the Katha features a transcendent Visnu. There is a move here from monism to panentheism, a dual perspective by which the atman is still identified with Brahman but only partly so: ultimately God - and here we can use the term God - is greater than all existence, not equated with it. These more theistic Upanisads refer to Brahman in its manifest, saguna, form as Isvara or simply Isa, meaning ' Lord '.This transcendent but manifest aspect of the Absolute is describable and is able to be related to on a more personal level. The following verse from the Svetarvatara Upanisad illustrates well both the transcendent Brahman as more subtle than the subtle arid greater than the great - that is to say beyond human conception - and, the personal God of grace:      Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great is the Self that is set in the cave of the (heart) of the creature. One beholds Him as being actionless and becomes freed from sorrow, when through the grace of the Creator he sees the Lord and His majesty.      However, while there is certainly evidence of theism in the Upanisads, especially in the later ones, it is not a move back to the theism of the Vedas for there is much more emphasis on the transcendent aspects of the divine than is evident with Vedic deities. The kind of theism which is evident in these later Upanisads is more explicit but there are elements of it in o