Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/509

x] Vediinta and other Systems 493 of the maya. Thus Isvara is believed to possess a mind of pure sattva alone. But sattva, rajas and tamas were accepted in Vedanta in the sense of tendencies and not as reals as Sarpkhya held it. Moreover, in spite of all modifications that maya was believed to pass through as the stuff of the world-appearance, it was indefinable and indefinite, and in its nature different from what we understand as positive or negative. It was an unsub- stantial nothing, a magic entity which had its being only so long as it appeared. Prakfti also was indefinable or rather undemon- strable as regards its own essential nature apart from its mani- festation, but even then it was believed to be a combination of positive reals. It was undefinable because so long as the reals composing it did not combine, no demonstrable qualities belonged to it with which it could be defined. Maya however was unde- monstrable, indefinite, and indefinable in all forms; it was a separate category of the indefinite. Sarpkhya believed in the personal individuality of souls, while for Vedanta there was only one soul or self, which appeared as many by virtue of the maya transformations. There was an adhyasa or illusion in Sarpkhya as well as in Vedanta; but in the former the illusion was due to a mere non-distinction between prakfti and puru!?a or mere misattribution of characters or identities, but in Vedanta there was not only misattribution, but a false and altogether inde- finable creation. Causation with Sarpkhya meant real transforma- tion, but with Vedanta all transformation was mere appearance. Though there were so many differences, it is however easy to see that probably at the time of the origin of the two systems during the Upaniad period each was built up from very similar ideas which differed only in tendencies that gradually manifested themselves into the present divergences of the two systems. Though SaIi.kara laboured hard to prove that the Sarpkhya view could not be found in the Upaniads, we can hardly be convinced by his interpretations and arguments. The more he argues, the more we are led to suspect that the Sarpkhya thought had its origin in the U paniads. SaIi.kara and his followers borrowed much of their dialectic form of criticism from the Buddhists. His Brahman was very much like the sunya of Nagarjuna. It is difficult indeed to distinguish between pure being and pure non-being as a category. The debts of SaIi.kara to the self-luminosity of the Vijfianavada Buddhism