The World Tree Rooted in Brahman

ῡrdhva-mῡlo’vᾱk-śᾱkha eṣo’śvatthas sanᾱtanaḥ,
tad eva śukraṁ tad brahma, tad evᾱmṛtam ucyate,
tasmin lokᾱḥ śritᾱḥ sarve tad u nᾱtyeti kaś cana: etad vai tat. (1)

“This is that eternal Ashvattha Tree with roots above and branches below. That indeed is the pure. That is Brahman. That alone is the immortal. In It, all worlds are contained, and none goes beyond. This, verily, is That.” The third section, the concluding one of this Upanishad, commences with a unique comparison, the same which we find in the fifteenth chapter of the Gita. While the words of the Gita differ slightly from those of this mantra, the idea is the same: it is the description of the famous Tree of Life.

The analogy of this tree is not peculiar to our scriptures alone. The tale of this tree can also be found in the mystical texts of other cultures, though descriptions may differ slightly; but they all symbolise life.

While trees usually have their roots growing downwards, this tree has them growing upwards. Why so? Why should it be unlike other trees? There is a spiritual significance in this. Just as a tree has an origin, life has an origin. As the tree goes through the process of growth and evolution, so does life. As the tree is sustained by certain elements, life also is sustained. As the tree has many branches, life is manifold too. As the tree sprouts forth into flowers and fruits, life does similarly. As the tree is exuberant in certain seasons, so is life. As the tree can be felled, life can be cut. As the tree falls, life also ends. The process of living can be compared to the growth of the tree. The reason why its roots strike upwards is the process of life itself.

The manifestation of the universe can be seen in two ways: it is not clear whether God created it instantaneously, by an act of Will, or whether it evolves, rising from one stage to another. The Bible says that God willed, and the universe came into existence. But the view of the scientists does not agree with this doctrine of yugapat-srishti; they hold that it has evolved. Vedanta accepts both theories. Even if creation is yugapat, this does not exclude the idea of evolution. The fact that time and space belong to creation does not necessarily suggest that it need be in space and time. In this timeless causation which is difficult for the mind to understand, the process of world evolution is super-intellectual. Ishvara creates in a mysterious manner, not in the logical way we think of. If His sudden Will were the cause of creation, it might be called whimsical. He would be accused of having made some people good and some bad. But, according to the Gita, God has no fancy. He takes the karmas of the jivas into consideration. Many trees grow on this earth: somewhere mango trees; somewhere thorns; various kinds in various places. The earth will bring forth whatever you sow, and sustain it, whether it is a tree with sweet fruit or a tree with bitter fruit. Likewise do the sun, the river, etc.; they shed light or give water to all in the same manner. Nature is absolutely impartial. So is God, the general Sustainer; He is supreme Impartiality, sustaining both the wicked and the virtuous. “The seeds are there,” says Shankaracharaya. Seeds represent those jivas who have been wound up in the previous cycle and who lie in deep sleep, as it were.

For example, we all go to sleep. A king sleeps, a beggar sleeps, a lawyer sleeps, and so on. We may say that in the state of deep sleep, we are all the same in one sense. The differences arise only when the ego sprouts. When it is hushed down in sleep, there is equality. In brahma-loka, the Cosmic Sleep into which all jivas are withdrawn at the end of a cycle, when Brahma, or hiranyagarbha, withdraws His personality, they do not get liberated, but lie wound up, ready for germination in the next kalpa. Just as sleep is not samadhi, the being wound up after a kalpa is not liberation. When Brahma wakes up into consciousness in the next cycle, the jivas shoot forth, and as we awake, being what we were yesterday, after our nightly sleep, so do they wake up to work out their karmas. The manner of working them out may vary slightly from kalpa to kalpa, but the method or pattern is the same. And so, at every pralaya or cyclic dissolution, the seeds of jivas are in the tree of life. They are there; they are not created.

Since when do they exist? This question cannot arise. Time is also a part of creation; it is from eternity to eternity. To every kalpa there is an earlier one, just as we cannot say whether the tree came first, or the seed.

The tree described here refers to a span of life. It has its roots above in Brahma, or hiranyagarbha. The Sankhya tells us that the world has evolved from mulaprakriti. If the seed is prakriti, the trunk is constituted of mahat and ahamkara. It has no branches; they shoot forth later on. It is sustained by the root of prakriti, the impartial light of the purusha. The branches ramify from the trunk. Two huge branches shoot forth from ahankara-tattva. These are the macrocosm and the microcosm, the brahmanda and the pindanda, we may say; a huge and a small branch, but both are sustained by the same trunk. On one side we have the tanmatras which mix to form the five elements, and the mahabhutas. On the other side, there are the psychological organs such as the mind, intellect, etc., in the individual. Then come the ten senses, the five pranas, the subsidiary pranas, the physical body; all intimately related to the brahmanda, constituted of the same stuff, all organically connected to the trunk. The psychological organs, senses, etc., have their loves and hatred, the tendency to virtue and vice, all the strong and weak points of human nature; the urge to evolution and involution, for sense-gratification and God-realisation.

The sap of the tree permeates each cell. Having its branches in the form of the elements, the mahabhutas, the sense-organs, it spreads out and downward, right from brahma-loka through the seven worlds above to this gross earth and the seven worlds below. This tree is sustained by the universal purusha or Brahman; it is permanent in one sense, and impermanent in another one. It is shashvata—it cannot be destroyed. It runs from eternity to eternity. The karmas of the jivas are the ultimate cause of it, and they are endless. But it is really not constituted of any eternal element. Neither this world nor this body can be said to be permanent.

The world and body, the panorama of creation, present before our senses a picture of permanency on account of the speed with which they rotate. If our eyes could rotate with the speed of the body’s electrons which form the bricks of the world, we could see them, and there would be no world to behold. They move fast and our eyes move slow, and hence there is perception of forms. There is destruction of body cells, a change in the position of electrons, and nothing remains steady. Like the flowing water of a river: when you touch it for a second, it is not the same as you touched earlier. Likewise, when you touch an object twice, you are not touching the same object. The flame of a lamp appears to be steady, but there is constant flow and you do not see the same flame a second time.

The world is constituted of such unsteady elements, and so it is said to be ashvatha, that which will not last till tomorrow; and yet it appears as permanent, shashvata. This so-called tree of samsara has its roots struck in prakriti constituted of sattva, rajas and tamas, but it is ultimately made up of one substance, whatever be the variety of this vast creation. The absolutely pure Brahman is the Source of it, and also its Sustainer and Withdrawer. From This, everything starts, and into This everything returns. Many examples are given to illustrate this point. Like the spider and its web, so is creation. The web is part of the matter of the spider’s body, but it appears as outside it. Or like the flashing forth of sparks of fire. This life-tree has its roots in Brahman. Even prakriti is in Brahman.

Ultimately, all is reducible to one substance: Consciousness. And into This, all creation gravitates. All beings are strung upon this Being. Every thing is connected to It, inseparably—even the distant stars and the high heavens. All things in all degrees of subtlety are connected to It; nothing is beyond the purusha, was said in an earlier verse.

“What is it that remains in the end of all things?” was Nachiketas’ question. “This is That,” is Yama’s answer.

The Great Fear

yad idaṁ kiñ ca jagat sarvam prᾱṇa ejati niḥsṛtam,
mahad bhayaṁ vajram udyatam, ya etad vidur amṛtᾱs te bhavanti. (2)

All things are strung on this Being, but not in a mechanical manner. The thread has no control over the beads, though they hang on it. But here, the relation is quite different. It is one of inseparability and organic connection: without the cause, there is no effect. Some say the relation between God and the world is like between an earthen pot and the earth of which it is a form. But others feel that it does not explain the whole situation. God is not merely the material; He also fashions it. He is the effective as well as the instrumental cause simultaneously. As ishvara—the universal Intelligence—He becomes the efficient cause, but as sattva, rajas and tamas—as what the Sankhya calls prakriti—He becomes the material one; the avarana-shakti and vikshepa-shakti, as the Vedanta puts it.

His control over creation is absolute, it is not conditional. Whatever the threads do, that happens to the cloth. If the threads extend, the cloth also expands. If the threads contract, so does the cloth. Whatever the thread’s colour, that is the cloth’s also. If there is no thread, there is no cloth. The expansion of God is the expansion of the world, because His will and the object—the world—are the same. They are not different like our will and objects. He works from within, not like a carpenter who is outside the object on which he works.

We cannot imagine what this combined material, instrumental and efficient causality of God is. Nothing can shake or move or be without His Will. This supreme hiranyagarbha, the sutratman, is the ultimate Controller of this vast puppet show of the cosmos. As He manipulates through His Will, so acts the universe. He is the mahaprana, the cosmic breath, and nothing can exist without Him; even the direction in which a leaf moves is determined by His Will: “The whole universe—whatever exists—vibrates because it has sprung from Brahman. It is a great terror, like the poised thunderbolt. Those who know It become immortal.” Great fear is God. Everything is afraid of this Supreme Will of ishvara. No one can go against it. Those who had the hardihood of disobeying are getting roasted in samsara, and yet He attracts everything back to Himself again.

The Satan of the Bible is a symbol for the original deviation of individual consciousness from ishvara’s will. The boons that God bestows on you, as well as the punishment He inflicts, are indescribable. The ocean of completeness, that is ishvara-sankalpa. It can sweep off everything, or absorb everything into Itself. It is like the vajra of Indra: a terror, an uplifted thunderbolt against everyone. Yet, people go against it and run after sense-objects, and thus are caught in the widespread net of death. It is compared to supreme fear because, like the parts of a machine that cannot deviate to an extra activity of their own, there is no freedom of going beyond ishvara-sankalpa. Freedom is not independence asserted over His Will. It is freedom to move within that. Our idea of freedom is to do whatever we like. It is not freedom, but license. The more we are away from ishvara-sankalpa, the more are we bound. The nearer we are to it, the freer we become. Human freedom is only a partial manifestation of His will in us. Even our apparent freedom is allowed by ishvara, and because of His sankalpa, we exist.

The moment you know this, you become free, because to know is to be. To know the existence of God as the material, instrumental and efficient causes in one’s own being is to rise at once to the state of immortality.

Thought moves things better than the limbs of the body. A powerful thought is capable of working great miracles, because of its capacity to permeate things more thoroughly than bodies coming into contact with external objects. Thus your thought, your attitude and volition have greater command. God being the greatest of these psychological forces, He can execute not merely by thought—thinking being too inadequate for Him—but by His mere being or existence, just as the sun, which moves not, can determine the movement of the orbit of other planets. Every star, every planet, every thing seems to have a prescribed way of motion. All are being controlled by a power which need not be visible. So does the whole cosmos act in all levels. This is the true meaning of the verse in the Bhagavadgita: ishvarah sarvabhutanam hrideshe’arjuna tishthati—God seated in all hearts works in a miraculous manner, without rest. His Existence is so interconnected with that of all else in creation that by His asserting it, all things are determined. This is what is meant by saying that fear is driven into the hearts of everything like a thunderbolt: no one can move out of the orbit of God’s will.

Birth and death are only a fraction of this miraculous will, because these two ends of the chain of development are not two distinct, unconnected elements in our life. They are means evolving to an end which need not be known to those involved. The entire process of the tree’s unfolding, from the seed to a small plant, a tree, into flowers, into fruits, to a condition of withering—everything is determined by the seed’s constitution. Similarly, the momentum hidden in space rockets, which is known only to the scientists, allows them the time to reach their destination, to return, etc. All this is contained in the mechanism’s hidden force.

When a thing is born, it is released with a momentum for working matters out. The force latent in the sperm and ovum, before the birth of the child, is a potential form, and the length of time from its revelation upto its death is determined in it. Birth, therefore, determines death. It is not an unconnected event taking place in a life. It is an organic link of the jiva’s existence. Likewise, too, is the peculiar determination of things, one being connected to another, and one life not getting merely extinct, but continuing after death. We may be reborn in any realm, and such birth would be impossible if some sort of relation were not already established between the soul and the realm into which it enters. The physical and astral worlds, organic and inert bodies—everything in all realms is determined by one single Will called ishvara-sankalpa.

bhayᾱd asyᾱgnis tapati, bhayᾱt tapati sῡryaḥ,
bhayᾱd indraś ca vᾱyuś ca, mṛtyur dhᾱvati pañcamaḥ. (3)

“From fear of It, fire burns, the sun shines; through fear of It, Indra, the wind and Death, the fifth, speed on their way.” The shining of the sun, the pouring of rains, the blowing of the wind, the changing of seasons—all these are determined by this single Law; and the scriptures say that no complaints should be made against rain or wind or heat, because they are divine. This illustrates that God is present in everything. He dwells in all natural processes, and we can worship Him through them. In all these manifestations, God is to be seen in the river that flows, in the sun that shines, in the trees that grow, in the birds that chirp, in the moral laws within us. Knowing this, one becomes immortal.