Upanishads - Criticism

Criticism

John Murray Mitchell, a Western writer, asserts that by suggesting that all appearance is an illusion, the Upanishads are potentially overturning ethical distinctions. A.E. Gough, an early European orientalist, remarked that the Upanishads were "the work of a rude age, a deteriorated race, and a barbarous and unprogressive community." About the Indian Philosophy in general, Gough continued to say, "In treating of Indian Philosophy a writer has to deal with thoughts of lower order than the thoughts of the every day life of Europe. The great difficulty lies in this, that a low order of ideas has to be expressed in a high order of terms, and that the English words suggest a wealth of analysis and association altogether foreign to thoughts that are to be reproduced. The effort is nothing less than an endeavour to revert to a ruder type of mental culture and to become for the time being barbarous." According to another writer, David Kalupahana, the Upanishadic thinkers came to consider change as a mere illusion, because it could not be reconciled with a permanent and homogeneous reality. They were therefore led to a complete denial of plurality. He states that philosophy suffered a setback because of the transcendentalism resulting from the search of the essential unity of things. Kalupahana explains further that reality was simply considered to be beyond space, time, change, and causality. This caused change to be a mere matter of words, nothing but a name and due to this, metaphysical speculation took the upper hand. As a result, the Upanishads fail to give any rational explanation of the experience of things. Paul Deussen criticized the idea of unity in the Upanishads as it excluded all plurality, and therefore, all proximity in space, all succession in time, all interdependence as cause and effect, and all opposition as subject and object.