In Hinduism, Ishvara (“Supreme Lord”[1]) is the concept of the personal deity – not any specific god or goddess, but rather the basic “model” behind any and all Hindu gods and goddesses.[2]
Hinduism teaches that Brahman, the divine absolute reality, can’t be accurately described in human speech at all. Brahman is therefore neither “personal” nor “impersonal.” Brahman is not a being like you and I are, but rather Being, existence, itself. Ishvara is that same divine absolute reality, but symbolically represented in the form of a being with concrete features and a concrete personality so that humans can more readily relate to it and worship it.[3]
To put this in more universal theological terms, the best way to speak about Brahman is to use “negative” or “apophatic” theology – to highlight its inscrutability by only saying what it isn’t. But in spiritual practice, no matter which religion we follow, we all need descriptions of the divine that take the form of “positive” or “kataphatic” theology – descriptions that say what the divine is – to point us in the right direction. Otherwise, we’d have little to no notion of what we’re aiming for in the first place, and it would be much harder to reach the divine. So even though any and all “positive” or “kataphatic” descriptions of the divine are ultimately inadequate, they’re also circumstantially indispensable. The concept of Ishvara is what provides Hindus with their own circumstantially indispensable “positive” descriptions of the divine.
Hinduism famously features a sprawling multitude of gods and goddesses rather than just one. But these deities aren’t treated as different parts of Brahman. Instead, each deity is a different way of representing Ishvara, the whole of Brahman in personal form. When a Hindu worships the god Vishnu, he or she approaches Vishnu as Brahman as a whole, yet when the same Hindu goes to worship the goddess Devi, he or she likewise approaches Devi as Brahman as a whole. Each of the many Hindu deities is not just a god or goddess, but also “God” with a capital “G.” There’s no contradiction here, because each deity is a different form or “face” of Ishvara rather than a separate, distinct being.[4]
Ishvara in the Upanishads
If Ishvara is Brahman symbolically represented as having verbally and visually expressible qualities, which specific qualities does Ishvara have? What is this “Supreme Lord” like? While each god or goddess of course has some qualities that are specific to him or her, what are the qualities that Ishvara always has, regardless of the specific form in which Ishvara is worshiped?
The best way to find out is to consult the Upanishads, a group of poems that come from the Vedas, the central set of sacred texts in Hinduism. The Upanishads are concerned with divulging the deepest secrets of reality, those that really define life the most. The Upanishads are therefore the most important source for the worldview of Hinduism.[5]
The Upanishads differentiate between a “higher” Brahman and a “lower” one, with the “higher” one being the ineffable Brahman itself and the “lower” one being Ishvara.[6] The Shvetashvatara Upanishad describes this transformation of Brahman from its incomprehensible formlessness into a particular form in order to appear before the mind of the worshiper:
Brahman, attributeless Reality,
Becomes the Lord of Love who casts his net
Of appearance over the cosmos and rules
It from within through his divine power.[7]
Ishvara is the creator, ruler, preserver, and destroyer of the world. He is immanent in everything while still transcending everything. To quote the Shvetashvatara Upanishad again,
He is the inner ruler
In all beings. He projects the cosmos
From himself, maintains and withdraws it
Back into himself at the end of time.
His eyes, mouths, arms, and feet are everywhere….
He fills the cosmos, yet he transcends it.[8]
Thus, everything is a manifestation of Ishvara. Things exist only inasmuch as they partake of Ishvara’s existence. The Mundaka Upanishad therefore says,
There is no one here but the Lord of Love.
He alone is; in truth, he alone is.[9]
But the place where Ishvara manifests the most intensely or directly is in the hearts of the beings he’s created. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad puts it this way:
In the depths of meditation, sages
Saw within themselves the Lord of Love,
Who dwells in the heart of every creature…
[He is] subtler than the subtlest,
Greater than the greatest.[10]
According to this same Upanishad, Ishvara is “infinite, omnipresent, all-knowing,” and filled to the brim with “glory” and “immortal bliss.”[11] As the creator and ruler of the cosmos, he presides over the laws of karma that keep beings trapped in the cycle of reincarnation, yet also grants liberation (Sanskrit moksha, the Hindu term for spiritual enlightenment) from karma and the wheel of birth and death:
Dedicate yourself to the Lord of Life,
Who is the cause of the cosmos. He will
Remove the cause of all your suffering
And free you from the bondage of karma.[12]
Moksha is the realization that Brahman is one’s own innermost Self (Sanskrit Atman), which is also the deepest Self of everything else, too. Ishvara is full of grace and bestows moksha as a gift of his grace. In the words of the Katha Upanishad,
They go beyond
All sorrow who extinguish their self-will
And behold the glory of the Self
Through the grace of the Lord of Love.[13]
As the Katha Upanishad goes on to say, this liberating grace is the reason why Brahman assumes the form of Ishvara for human devotees:
Brahman, the hidden Self in everyone,
…is revealed only
To those who keep their minds one-pointed
On the Lord of Love and thus develop
A superconscious manner of knowing.[14]
Thus, in the end, as the Shvetashvatara Upanishad puts it,
The world is the river of God,
Flowing from him and flowing back to him.[15]
Ishvara in Hindu Philosophy
For millennia, Hindu philosophers have debated the precise nature of the relation between Ishvara and Brahman. While all of these philosophers agree that the Vedas, including the Upanishads, are infallible revelation, they’ve interpreted those texts in ways that sometimes differ dramatically from each other. Hinduism treats all of these philosophies as creations of the fallible human mind, so none of them demand uncritical acceptance by all Hindus.[16] However, two of these philosophies in particular have heavily influenced the ways in which Hindus think about their deities, so this article would be incomplete without at least giving a brief summary of these two philosophies on the question of Ishvara.
The two philosophies it’s necessary to consider here are those of the thinkers Shankara and Ramanuja. Shankara’s philosophy is called Advaita Vedanta. The word Vedanta refers to an interpretation of the Upanishads,[17] and advaita means “monistic” or “non-dualistic.”[18] This means that Shankara stresses the Upanishads’ message of the oneness of all things.
Ramanuja’s philosophy is called Vishishtadvaita Vedanta. The word Vishishtadvaita is the word advaita with vishishta, “qualified,” added to it.[19] As that name implies, Ramanuja agrees with Shankara’s monism or non-dualism up to a point, but not fully.
Shankara systematizes the Upanishads’ teachings on the “higher” and “lower” Brahman that we saw earlier. For Shankara, the “higher” Brahman is called Nirguna Brahman or “Brahman without Attributes.” This is Brahman in itself, which can’t be described in human language. The “lower” Brahman or Ishvara is Saguna Brahman, “Brahman with Attributes.”[20]
Shankara’s preferred spiritual path is what Hinduism calls jnana yoga, which largely consists of gaining a clear intellectual understanding of the Upanishads’ teachings and striving to realize them for oneself through particular meditation practices. Nirguna Brahman is what one finally encounters at the end of this quest – the only thing left when all cravings and notions have been stripped away from one’s awareness.[21]
However, the spiritual path that most Hindus follow is bhakti yoga, the path of loving devotion toward a personal deity. Saguna Brahman or Ishvara makes bhakti yoga possible and legitimizes it, although Shankara holds that bhakti yoga and Saguna Brahman are ultimately a set of means to the end of the realization of Nirguna Brahman.[22]
Whereas Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta is optimized for jnana yoga, Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita Vedanta is optimized for bhakti yoga. Ramanuja holds that Shankara’s Nirguna Brahman is nothing more than an irrelevant intellectual abstraction. The form in which the worshiper encounters Brahman in bhakti yoga is always Ishvara. So, Ramanuja says, Brahman is inherently Ishvara, Brahman with a persona and attributes.[23]
But then what does Ramanuja do with the many passages in the Upanishads that say that Brahman is beyond any and all notions and forms that could be attributed to it? Such passages, Ramanuja insists, don’t really say that Brahman has no attributes at all, but rather that he lacks any bad or “inauspicious” attributes.[24] Frankly, it seems to me that this interpretation is at best an enormous stretch, if not an outright denial, of some of the Upanishads’ core teachings about Brahman.
Ramanuja’s philosophy has much to recommend it in other ways, as I discuss in other articles on Hinduism on this site. But when it comes to the specific point of the relation between Brahman and Ishvara, I can’t help but conclude that Shankara’s philosophy is much truer to both the letter and the spirit of the Upanishads than Ramanuja’s philosophy is. And like the Upanishads themselves, Shankara’s view of Ishvara gives both jnana yoga and bhakti yoga all the room they need to flourish. Ramanuja seems to be over-optimizing for bhakti yoga here, effectively treating it as if it were an end in itself rather than a means to the end of moksha. To attempt to “confine” Brahman to the attributes it takes on in the context of bhakti yoga doesn’t seem to do justice to Brahman’s infinite, transcendent nature; those very attributes themselves seem to demand a recognition of something like what Shankara calls “Nirguna Brahman,” which is what one encounters in the indescribable experience of moksha. And moksha is what Hinduism holds to be the meaning of life, the end toward which everything else in the religion, including bhakti yoga, is a means.[25]
References:
[1] Sastry, Trilochan. 2022. The Essentials of Hinduism: An Introduction to All the Sacred Texts. Penguin/Viking Press. p. 58.
[2] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 108.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. p. 116-117.
[5] Ibid. p. 156-157.
[6] Ibid. p. 357.
[7] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 165.
[8] Ibid. p. 165-167.
[9] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Mundaka Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 192.
[10] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 159-160, 168.
[11] Ibid. p. 163.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Katha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 79.
[14] Ibid. p. 82.
[15] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 160.
[16] Sastry, Trilochan. 2022. The Essentials of Hinduism: An Introduction to All the Sacred Texts. Penguin/Viking Press. p. 78.
[17] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 141-142.
[18] Bartley, Christopher. 2015. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources. Bloomsbury. p. 182.
[19] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 144.
[20] Ibid. p. 142-144.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid. p. 144-145.
[24] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 361.
[25] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65-66.