86 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
via the Six Darshanas! What a false move in the quest for wisdom! It is as if a caravan should travel across the desert to the shores of the Dead Sea in search of fresh water! Young men of India, look not for wisdom in the musty parchments of your metaphysical treatises. There is nothing but an endless round of verbal jugglary there. Read Rousseau and Voltaire, Plato and Aristotle, Haeckel and Spencer, Marx and Tolstoi, Ruskin and Comte, and other European thinkers, if you wish to understand life and its problems.”
But denunciations apart, did the Upanishad philosophy have any influence on Hinduism as a social and political system? There is no doubt that it turned out to be most ineffective and inconsequential piece of speculation with no effect on the moral and social order of the Hindus.
It may not be out of place to inquire into the reasons for this unfortunate result. One reason is obvious. The philosophy of Upanishad remained incomplete and therefore did not yield the fruit which it ought to have done. This will be quite clear if one asks what is the key-note of the Upanishads. In the words of Prof. Max Muller [1] the key note of the Upanishads is ‘Know thy Self”. The ‘Know thy Self of the Upanishads, means, know thy true Self, that which underlies thine ego and find it and know it in the highest, the eternal self, the One without a Second, which underlies the whole world.”
That Atman and Brahman were one was the truth, the great truth which the Upanishads said they had discovered and they asked man to know this truth. Now the reasons why the philosophy of Upanishads, became ineffective are many. I will discuss them elsewhere. At this place I will mention only one. The philosophers of Upanishads did not realize that to know truth was not enough. One must learn to love truth. The difference between philosophy and religion may be put in two ways. Philosophy is concerned with knowing truth. Religion is concerned with the love of truth. Philosophy is static. Religion is dynamic. These differences are merely two aspects of one and the same thing. Philosophy is. static because it is concerned only with knowing truth. Religion is dynamic beause it is concerned with love of truth. As has been well said by Max Plowman [2] :—
“....... Unless religion is dynamic and begets in us the emotion of love for something, then it is better to be without any thing that we can call religion; for religion is perception of truth and if our perception of truth is not accompanied by our love for it then it were better not seen at all; The Devil himself is one who has seen
1 Hibbert lectures 1878. p. 3I7.
2 “The Nemesis of Ineffectual Religion”— Adelphi, January 1941.