Absolute Truth and Chandra Taal
While I changed the gears of my car on my recent trip to Chandra Taal I happened to notice the grandiosity of the mountain on my left. The curious explorer in me happens to find new questions and mysteries at every turn. I wondered how long the mountain has existed and how many people across centuries have walked past it. I thought about the Sthānika Kathā about Pāṇḍavas along with Draupadī climbing the same mountains in their quest to find the stairway to heaven. I also thought about the celestial love story that people of Lahaul grew up with the story of Chandra and Bhaga rivers that originate on different sides of Baralacha Pass from Surya Taal and Chandra Taal respectively, travelling thousands of metres away from each other. They are very poetically believed to be the daughter of the Moon and the son of the Sun who are forbidden to be together only to merge into the sacred confluence near Tandi and becoming one as Chandrabhaga river- a beautiful celestial conjunction.
As soon as I crossed Batal and turned towards Chandra Taal instead of heading towards Kunzum Pass, I began to feel a pull towards the majestic Mount CB-14 which is a part of the Chandrabhaga range. While I was in absolute awe of its beauty, I was also in awe of everything that mountain had witnessed for as long as it has existed. It was my fourth time driving on the dangerous roads, yet they could not stop me from the questions that kept surfacing underneath the thrill. I had questions about the history of those mountains, their magnitude and their beauty. I formed countless opinions about everything the mountain was witness to. All of these opinions came from my perspective. The mountain’s existence did not care about what my perspective was. It stood tall long before I knew about it, saw it or attempted to perceive it from any direction at all. It would also continue to do so long after I cease to exist.
The mountain made me dive into a question that has been explored by many minds, since the beginning of thought itself- the pursuit of truth. Is truth absolute- independent of interpretation or observation? Is unity discovered beneath plurality, or expressed through plurality? At every turn I saw a different side of the same mountain. The mountain remained unchanged. What changed was where I was looking at it from. Similarly, every person who might have been on the same path, must have seen a different version of the mountain based on what their mind chose to focus on. A pilgrim sees divinity and a photographer sees composition. I thought how travel begins with distance and so does philosophy. Both end with a mystery of whether distance was ever really what it seemed.
The person standing on the top of the mountain, believes it to be white and snow covered while the one at the base camp, only sees the brown soil. Their perspectives are equally true and can coexist. Anekāntavāda in Jainism is a school of thought that views reality as pluralistic. According to it, all valid viewpoints, nayas, can coexist as pieces of a larger puzzle. A thing can be both existent and non-existent, permanent and impermanent depending on different parameters. Rather than believing that truth is one, it treats any single statement as incomplete through Syādvāda, qualified always by the angle it was spoken from. Vedānta gives this same relative seeing its own name too, Vyāvahārika Satya, one of three levels of reality Śaṅkara distinguished, before asking what might lie beneath it.
Sage Uddālaka Āruṇi in Chāndogya Upaniṣad approached truth differently. He taught his son Śvetaketu about ultimate reality using a clay metaphor. He explained that all things are different names and forms (nāmarūpa) layered over one underlying substance, which the verse itself calls satyam. He believed that the ultimate reality of all things that exist is the same.
यथा सोम्यैकेन मृत्पिण्डेन सर्वं मृन्मयं विज्ञातं स्याद् वाचारम्भणं विकारो नामधेयं मृत्तिकेत्येव सत्यम् ॥
yathā somyaikena mṛtpiṇḍena sarvaṃ mṛnmayaṃ vijñātaṃ syād vācārambhaṇaṃ vikāro nāmadheyaṃ mṛttiketyeva satyam
“By knowing a single lump of earth you know all objects made of earth. All changes are mere words, in name only. But earth is the reality.”
Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.1.4
The snow on the mountaintop and the water in the lake are apparently made of the same water after all. Chāndogya Upaniṣad argues that substance is the only reality and multiplicity is nominal.
Anekāntavāda reveals something Advaita cannot ignore, the irreducible reality of perspective. Advaita reveals something Anekāntavāda cannot ignore, the possibility of an underlying unity. How can reality be one without erasing its many appearances, and many without dissolving into fragmentation?
It makes me question how duality is functionally necessary for experiencing or even questioning the absolute truth.
I was in a deep thinking state when I pulled over to calm the heat that the tyres and the engine were feeling by that point and if I am being honest, so was my mind. I sat on the rock looking at Chandra being watched over by the mighty Himalayas, knowing I had to responsibly drive all three girls to the campsite in time. However, the thought that duality is functionally necessary for experiencing or even questioning the absolute truth had me in a state of absolute trance. I was snapped out of it by the touch of drizzling rain that calmed the gusting winds and the scorching sun at the same time. I got back inside the car and tried to recall the verse from Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad that I had read a few years back.
यत्र हि द्वैतम् इव भवति तद् इतर इतरं पश्यति । …
यत्र वा अस्य सर्वम् आत्मैवाभूत् तत् केन कं पश्येत्
yatra hi dvaitam iva bhavati tad itara itaram paśyati …
yatra vā asya sarvam ātmaivābhūt tat kena kaṃ paśyet
“For where there is duality, as it were, there one sees another… But when the whole has become one’s very Self, then whereby and whom should one see?”
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.14
It reinforces the same thought that duality is the condition that makes perception possible at all. There is nothing left to perceive when nothing remains but the self. Heraclitus is known for saying that no one steps into the same river twice, since the water has already moved on, and so has the one stepping into it. Parmenides argued the opposite, that motion itself is the deception and only what never changes is real. The mountain had already refused to choose between them. For as long as I stood there, nothing about it moved, not the ridge, not the snow line. But ice and frost had been working on its face for centuries, slow enough that no single visit could ever catch it happening, steady enough that it never once stopped.
We were barely a kilometre away from the destination when my sister, who was very gracefully being the ever-supportive co-pilot on the journey, played the song “Safarnama” from the movie Tamasha. We found ourselves singing along to the song when she pointed towards a rainbow that seemed to touch down on the banks of Chandra. The rainbow’s appearance pushed my rumination further. I thought about how the Pāṇḍavas, who are believed to have walked the same roads in a whole different era, might have come across a rainbow as well. Both the rainbows might be different but the laws that govern the formation of the phenomenon have stayed the same forever. The truth behind them stayed absolute, even though the rainbows themselves were distanced by centuries. The same idea is mirrored in the principles of Ṛta and Satya, which I would later read about once we were back in range, where the phone would light up and the mind, which had been doing exactly that on its own, would dim.
ऋतं च सत्यं चाभीद्धात्तपसोऽध्यजायत ॥
ṛtaṃ ca satyaṃ cābhīddhāt tapaso ‘dhyajāyata
“From that glowing tapas, both ṛta and satya were born.”
Ṛgveda 10.190.1
Ṛta, the order that moves, and satya, the truth that stays, are not rivals arriving at different times in this verse. They are twins, born from the same heat. Īśā Upaniṣad, Verse 5, takes the refusal further. It argues that one truth does not resolve its own contradictions. It is capable of holding opposites simultaneously without requiring any side to win.
तद् एजति तन् नैजति तद् दूरे तद् व् अन्तिके । तद् अन्तर् अस्य सर्वस्य तद् उ सर्वस्यास्य बाह्यतः ॥
tad ejati tan naijati / tad dūre tad v antike / tad antar asya sarvasya / tad u sarvasyāsya bāhyataḥ
“It moves and It moves not; It is far and likewise near; It is within all this; It is outside all this.”
Īśā Upaniṣad 5
It strangely reminds me of Bohr’s complementarity principle, where light and matter behave as both wave and particle, never both at once in a single measurement, yet both descriptions are needed for the full picture.
Back on the path, the question hadn’t settled with the lake still out of sight. If Īśā Upaniṣad could hold motion and stillness without resolving them, I wondered whether the same mountain’s many names were doing something similar. Ekam Sat (Ṛgveda 1.164.46) argues that reality is singular.
इन्द्रं मित्रं वरुणं अग्निं आहुः अथो दिव्यः स सुपर्णो गरुत्मान् । एकं सद् विप्रा बहुधा वदन्ति अग्निं यमं मातरिश्वानं आहुः ॥
indraṃ mitraṃ varuṇaṃ agniṃ āhuḥ / atho divyaḥ sa suparṇo garutmān / ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti / agniṃ yamaṃ mātariśvānaṃ āhuḥ
“They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, Agni… To what is One, sages give many a title: they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan.”
Ṛgveda 1.164.46
The various names of reality are a mere function of approach and not evidence that reality itself is plural. The mountain will be called Mount CB-14 by the mountaineer I was going to meet and probably just a beautiful white hill by the six- or seven-year-old waving at me from the car that I just overtook.
After the drive ended and I started the trek to Chandra Taal from the campsite, I came across a woman who shared my curiosity for the pursuit of truth. She turned our four-girl group into a quintet. After the first six hundred metres of the 3 km walk at an altitude of more than 14,000 feet, half of my girls were utterly exhausted. I told them all to take a break and just lie down. “Breathe, and feel you’re one with the universe“ I told them. “Tat Tvam Asi“ are the words I heard in response from the young woman who had just joined us.
तत्त्वमसि
tat tvam asi
“That thou art.“
Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7
Her words led me to have a beautiful exchange of perspectives. We wondered whether the individual self and the absolute were ever two distinct things. We ended up approaching the same question in countless ways away from the network and sounds of the city. What is the ground that makes both truth and perspective possible?
Erwin Schrödinger who is famous for the thought experiment Schrödinger’s cat that points towards the bizarre nature of quantum superposition found resonance with Vedānta, writing in My View of the World and recorded in Walter Moore’s biography, “Vedānta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.”
We floated between Anekāntavāda and Vedānta, while walking past the iconic views of Samudra Tapu and the yellow wildflowers that lit up the trail to our destination. The blue moon shaped lake finally appeared. Every traveller saw a different mountain on that way. Yet all of them insisted they had seen the same one.
None of this could be held the way I wanted to hold it. Looking back, I think I needed someone to say it out loud, even if that someone was only the part of me that already knew.
यस्यामतं तस्य मतं मतं यस्य न वेद सः । अविज्ञातं विजानतां विज्ञातमविजानताम् ॥
yasyāmataṃ tasya mataṃ mataṃ yasya na veda saḥ / avijñātaṃ vijānatāṃ vijñātamavijānatām
“He who thinks he knows It, knows It not. He who knows that he cannot know It, knows It.”
Kena Upaniṣad 2.3
The quest for absolute truth had been turned over from many angles by this time. There was no approach that landed anywhere absolute. Maybe not landing was the only absolute thing in any of it. She and I sat by the waters of Chandra that evening, knowing Bhaga waited somewhere out of sight. The distance between them had never been what it looked like.
Citations: Verse translations drawn from Ralph T.H. Griffith’s Ṛgveda, 1896, Max Müller’s Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Sacred Books of the East, 1884, and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad commentary of Swami Lokeswarananda. The Īśā Upaniṣad and Kena Upaniṣad renderings, and the line from Ṛgveda 10.190.1 on Ṛta and Satya, follow widely circulated English renderings whose original translators could not be independently confirmed in this pass. The Schrödinger quotation is from Cecily Hastings’ translation of My View of the World, Cambridge University Press, 1964.
This essay sits at the intersection of Philosophy & Existence and Travel & History.