When we talk about purpose we mean an activity that has a beginning and an end and a finite number of steps in between in and through which a task can be accomplished. So when we ask about the purpose or reason for the existence of the world we mean to inquire about why the world began to exist and when and how that purpose can be fulfilled which would be the end of history or the universe as such. There cannot be such a thing as an eternal task which we can see in Sisyphus’s story would render all activity pointless. There is also another sense of purpose in the sense of an immanent end which is not incompatible with eternity of the world. I shall elaborate that both these senses of purposefulness are rejected by Indian philosophers and then I shall explain in what sense liberation (moksha) is the purpose of our existence and the ultimate human good.
Advaita Vedanta believes that the world is an appearance of the true ultimate reality Brahman. We have been trapped in the universe of action because we have identified ourselves with our bodies and take ourselves to be a moral and physical agent of action. This identification of self and not-self is based on delusion but what it does is to subject the soul to a moral and a physical order while his true nature transcends that order. There is no end we can realize within the moral order itself because the soul is not perfected through any practice of morality because in its true nature it is already perfect. What is needed to reacquire our freedom is to realize this true nature of the self but that means the soul has to go back to its origin and to see that it need not desire anything since it is already perfect and does not lack anything and to realize that it does not need to fear anyone because the self is all that exists and fear presupposes the existence of someone other than the self. The soul has to get outside the physical and moral order, there is no progressive movement forward because if the soul is finite it can never become infinite and it will always lack something and shall never know perfection. But if it is already perfect then the required movement is backwards, to go back to the root our existence from which we have fallen by becoming subject to law of karma and rebirth. But one cannot simply transcend the moral order at will nor can freedom be gained within this order. The way out of this impasse is karma-yoga, to stay within the moral order yet above it by relinquishing the desire for fruits of our action or surrendering them to God. When such a person has attained a distaste for the world and an intense desire for freedom then he is qualified to renounce the world and as a sanayasi then he can attempt to gain transcendental knowledge of Brahman and his true self and thereby to gain his freedom from the moral order that condemns him to rebirth. Essentially the same thinking is found in Buddhism and Sankhya schools of thought.
Even though the true nature of the soul is perfect freedom, bliss, consciousness yet there is a certain forgetfulness because of which it falls to become subject to a moral order of the law of karma leading to constant rebirth. Through his desires the soul tries to find something in the world which never had left his possession - his happiness or bliss. But this desire for happiness, fulfillment keeps prodding him on to the performance of worldly activities but no happiness can be found in the mortal world. The immortal can only find happiness in the immortal. Hence the worldly sojourn of the soul is full of frustration and sadness. This is the basic line of thinking of all major schools of Indian thought. They are pessimistic about this world but optimistic about another more perfect world.
In the Bible we find the story of Adam’s downfall from Eden. It is a question that bothers everyone that if Eden was so perfect why did Adam ever fall from it. If Adam was so perfect why did he disobey God. The question is not about a story but really the source of evil in a perfect universe. In the Indian context too it can be asked how is it that despite being perfect the soul becomes associated with the law of karma by forgetting its own nature. The law of karma cannot explain this forgetfulness since it is itself the consequence of that forgetfulness. To realize this is important because some try to evade the question by pointing to the beginninglessness of the world. There was no time when souls forgot their nature and became associated with the law of karma. It just is the case that souls have been associated with ignorance and the beginning of time or a time cycle itself is explained because of this association. So for instance Sankhya believes that prakriti manifests itself for the sake of Purusha who since beginningless time is associated with the law of karma again due to ignorance of its own nature. When Purusha becomes frustrated in his search for happiness and his desire for further manifestations of Prakriti is exhausted then he turns back to understand his own nature and free himself from the snares of prakriti and thereby even prakriti’s own end is fulfilled. The movement of the material universe is not to perfect the soul but to frustrate him enough so that he can go back from where he has come.
Ramanuja’s Vishishtadviata gives essentially the same answer as Sankhya, it just is the case that souls are entangled with material prakriti and God due to his benevolence allows the souls to work out their liberation by creating or manifesting the world which was prior to his action existing but in an unmanifest state. Dvaita Vedanta would have none of this and simply says that the soul’s forgetfulness and identification with matter is due to God’s Will without which matter has no power whatsoever to affect the soul in anyway. Advaita Vedanta gives voice to the inexplicability of the matter by positing maya or ajnana which hides the true nature of the soul as identical with Brahman and manifests as if magically the entire universe for the soul to experience. But maya or ajnana is realized as an irrational category and it is recognized that the soul and matter are so different from one another that it is completely irrational that one is mistaken for the other and so we must assume the existence of a power like maya that obscures the nature of the soul leading to mis-identification in the order of nature and its consequent misery.
The soul is ever perfect and hence does not need a temporal process to perfect itself. Time And space are intervals or intermediate between the beginning of an activity and its end. The purpose fulfills what at a prior point of time was lacking. Any task or purpose requires a finite amount of time because any task can only be accomplished in a finite number of steps depending on the distance between the beginning and ending. An infinite task cannot be accomplished even in an infinite time because an infinite time would never end. Now in Indian philosophy time is without beginning and this coupled with the fact that the soul whether it is taken to be infinite as is done by Advaita Vedanta or finite but dependent or a part of the infinite as in theistic Vedanta implies that the intermediate steps to traverse a certain distance in a certain time is redundant because what is sought to be accomplished in time is in a way already accomplished. Time has a heuristic value to remind the soul of the timelessness of its own nature. But this timelessness can be understood in two different ways. In the way of Advaita Vedanta eternity and immortality is not in time but in the absence of time. Time is eternal in a secondary sense but Brahman is eternal in the sense that he transcends time or is outside its boundaries. So liberation too consists in unity with Brahman which is outside time. But in theistic schools there is a different sense of timelessness. God is outside time but only in the sense of being its ground while the latter depends for its existence on God. God’s eternity is not in absence of time but it is a timelessness in time. So while liberation is a reverting back to one’s original source, it is also more. The liberated can return to the world when it acquires a new significance as rooted in timelessness. Since Brahman is timeless, it is perfect. The world is still devoid of an intrinsic end or meaning towards which it is moving. Time does not add or subtract from the perfection of the world, which is rooted in timelessness of Brahman and so is already perfect. But once one’s own and the world’s dependence on Brahman is grasped it is also seen that time - which is suffering change - does not really cause any diminution in the world’s perfection. It was the absence of the vision of worlds’s dependence on God that made it a play of private ends sought by individuals in time which was the cause of suffering. But now that God’s perfection is seen in the temporal universe one is also able to see it as blissful and devoid of suffering and so a liberated soul can return to the world and live without being affected by its mutability in any way because strangely the world is immutable even when in mutation because of its dependence on God. This is certainly an enhancement in the Indian worldview and this picture was adopted even by Advaita Vedantins like Madhusudana Saraswati and Appaya Dikshit in later times. But still in Advaita Vedanta the one Brahman is opposed to the many and from the ultimate standpoint the many do not exist. Their co-existence is assumed within the vyavharik point of view and is sublatable by true knowledge but can be adapted only as a make believe by the liberated soul or a concession to the worldly but its basis is the dependence of the world on Brahman though the incommensurability of the two remains problematic for theistic Advaitins.
Another point to note is that the world can have a purpose in two senses, one is in the sense in which an artifact has a purpose, a creator makes the world to fulfill a purpose but a purpose which is given to it by an intelligence different from it. Second is if the world intrinsically has a purpose. This was the point of view of philosophers like Aristotle. In this conception the world need not have a beginning, it may even be beginningless or eternal. What is important is that it has an immanent end or purpose, not given to it from outside but which it has intrinsically due to its very existence and that it moves to realize this end. Both these point of views are not adopted in Indian philosophy including the theistic schools of Vedanta. The first way is not found because there is no creator God, no beginning of time itself since the world is eternal but with this answer we have only scratched the surface. The forgetfulness of the soul that entangles it within the world of beginning is not an event in time. One can still ask why and how did the soul forget its nature. Even like Dvaitins if one gives the reply that it is the will of God, one does so on the basis of complete inexplicability or irrationality of the association of soul and body that renders all human experience to irrational. Of this forgetfulness no rational answer can be given and this leads to the thought that something already perfect cannot be made perfect and perfection of the soul cannot be realized in time, time is redundant for the soul because it is timeless and cannot accomplish any of its purpose in time. So whether it be non-theistic or theistic schools of Vedantic thought, they all see springs of action in ignorance of the soul to understand its true nature. They see the world sub specie aeternitas, to borrow Spinoza’s phrase or from an eternal point of view and they see it as perfect from which time cannot add or subtract anything. Sankhya sees the soul as already perfect but does not see it as anchored in infinite and hence its state of liberation is timelessness in the sense of absence of time. So the reason why Indian philosophers do not see any immanent end in the world is because the soul has no rational connection with the world. Its desires, interests with the world have no rational motivation since they are based on ignorance or a forgetfulness of one’s own nature. The world has a temporary value only in frustrating the soul to seek its source within the timeless. Liberation is only disconnecting the soul from the world and though a renewed connection is possible, it does not add any sense of purpose in the world, immanent or not, all that can be said is that the renewed connection does not hurt the soul that understands the eternity of Brahman and the anchorage of the soul and the world within Brahman.
The Buddha believed that the questions about the eternity or the beginning of the world are irrelevant for the liberation or nirvana. The highest wisdom is even in Buddhism is still to acquire metaphysical knowledge of the universe but this highest wisdom consists in understanding the soullessness of the universe. It is a misunderstanding about Indian philosophy in general and Buddhism in particular that it gives only certain tools of methods to meditate and achieve liberation. But liberation is achieved in all schools of thought only with wisdom or insight into the nature of reality itself. Afflictions (kleshas) are caused in the mind due to wrong perception of reality that needs correction and one attains a calm mind and an impeccable character not simply through meditation, helpful though it may be in one’s journey, but only with the final insight into the nature of reality itself does all one’s afflictions end. For the Buddhists that reality is soullessness of the world. There is nothing permanent not subject to flux or always changing. An individual is not a simple but a composite entity and is in a way fictional. It takes itself to be an entity, attributes agency of activity to itself but when it realizes the truth that he is nothing over and above the skandhas and does not really exist then he attains nirvana. The soul through his clinging to the universe gives continuity to its existence but once it is realized that the root of this clinging lies in ignorance then it exhausts its karma without producing new karma which depends on volition or will of the agent to acquire something. By ending ignorance this acquisitiveness also ends and so no new karma is produced thereby one can end the rounds of rebirth.
So one can discern a pattern over here. Human experience is based on a completely irrational grounds, that of ignorance of the true nature of the self and the misidentification of the self and body. Due to this the soul takes himself to be an agent of an action because he has desires and uses his will to achieve the object of desire. In desiring, willing and acting he incurs a moral obligation due to the law of karma which he has to discharge whether in this life or another. Or else there is really no moral obligation and as one finds in the early Upanishads whose view is that rebirth is not due to moral responsibility but because of desire itself. If this view is taken then one may infer that there is no need to exhaust one’s past karmas, the moment one realizes one’s true nature, that moment one becomes free from all karmas. But then there would be problem in explaining jivanmukti. Anyways this desire is born due to ignorance whether conceived simply as lack of knowledge or a positive entity that obstructs knowledge and misleads with wrong information. But all human experience is due to ignorance and yet it is simply a fact that human beings are ignorant of their true nature wherever that may be but no explanation of how the soul forgets its true nature can be given. No rational explanation can be provided of something which is deeply irrational itself. If the world had a purpose then there must have been a rational explanation for the association of soul and body, an explanation that tells us why or what soul is lacking that it can accomplish only through a body. But the forgetfulness has to be taken as a fact and our only way out is not through acquiring greater perfection because the finite can never be infinite, because true freedom cannot be found in a world subject to moral and physical laws. It is not in becoming but in being that true freedom lies. So one has to transcend nature to return to one’s root or origin which means not a going forward or fulfilling a purpose, the purpose is rather to make the soul realize that this is not his true home and he needs to go back, to return to his world. We need time in the realm of human experience because our finite goals can be accomplished in a finite time but liberation is not something that can occur in time and hence the world cannot have liberation as its goal or purpose either given to it from outside or as an immanent end. Yet the value of the world or our experiences lies only in this that they remind us our our bondage and prod us to inquire into our true nature which is free and outside time.
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