Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/134

118 V E D A N T A sages behold as the source of all. " In reference to tins text the scholiast Anamlagiri says, "If we know the principium, the upd- ddna, of things, we shall know all tilings, inasmuch as all things have pre-existed in and are identical with their causes." Sarika- racharya says : " In daily life things are known to ordinary people, if the unities are known under which those things are contained. For example, individual pieces of gold are known under the nature of gold. Thus the question of the text is, what is the one cause or emanatory principle of the diversity of the universe, which known everything else is known ? " In the Chhiindogya Upanishad : " His father said to him, Sve- taketu, thou art high-minded, wise in thy own conceit, and proud. Tell me, hast thou asked for that instruction by which the unheard is heard, the unthought thought, the unknown known ? He answered, How is that instruction given, sir ? His father said, Dear son, as by one lump of clay all that is made of clay becomes known, being a modification of speech only, a change, a name, and the clay being the only reality ; as by one piece of iron all that is made of iron becomes known, being a modification of speech only, a change, a name, and the iron being the only reality ; as by a pair of scissors all that is made of steel becomes known, being a modifica tion of speech only, a change, a name, and the steel, being the only reality : such is the method of that instruction. Svetakctu said, Sir, doubtless my teacher knew not that, for, had he known it, how could he have failed to tell me of it ? Do thou therefore tell me of it. His father said, Be it so, my dear son. Existent only, fair youth, w r as this in the beginning, one only, without duality. Some indeed have said, non-existent only was this in the beginning, one only, without duality. From that non-existent the existent pro ceeded. But how could this be so ? how could entity proceed out of non-entity ? " In the Svetasvatara Upanishad : " Those that proclaim Brahman say, What is the principium t Is it the impersonal self? From what have w r e proceeded into life ? into what do we return ? By what are we upheld as we pass through pleasures and pains ? Is time the prinripium ? Is the inherent property of things their principium ? Is chance ? Are the elements ? Or is the individual soul the origin of all things ? Or is the sum of these the principium ? Neither is any one of these, nor are all of these, the principium, for it is the impersonal self. It is not the individual self, for that is not independent, being subject to pleasures and to pains." The most powerful incentive to speculation was the yearning to escape the miseries of transmigration. The soul has to pass through hunger and thirst, sorrow, bereavement, decrepitude, death, in body after body, through age after age. The individual soul has to look forward to continual suffering through a countless series of embodiments. The series is without beginning, and, until the individual learns his impersonal nature, without end. The series of transmigratory spheres is projected and retracted, projected and retracted, from before all time. Periods of evolution and of dis solution follow each other from and to eternity. Any intervals of pleasure in the series of states through which the soul passes are fugitive and unsatisfying. Even the pleasures of the paradises of the deities are tainted with the fear of their expiry, and with the inequalities amongst the participants. They also are part of the darkness in which everything appears to be involved. The transmigratory series, or samsdra, is said to consist of agents, actions, and fruits of action. The fruits of action are the bodies and the environments allotted according to good or evil works. It is described as an unbroken succession of evils, birth, death, bereavement, and other sorrows, arising from transition from body to body. The individual soul floats down the stream, "like a gourd upon the waters, " through embodiment after embodiment, "from a patch of grass to the first of the divinities," through forms, inorganic and organic, vegetable, animal, human, ultra- human, infernal, and celestial. Each later stage is determined by the good or evil actions of the individual in his earlier embodi ments, by a blindly, a fatally operating law of retribution, ndrishfa. It is iu conformity to this principle that the opifcx uedificatorquc mundi deus, the Demiurgus, Isvara, puts together and rules the transmigratory series through the successive reons. It is this principle that clears the Demiurgus of the charge of cruelty and injustice on account of the misenes and inequalities of life. In all that it does and suffers the soul is reaping the fruits of its own actions. Its actions proceed from preferences and aversions ; its preferences and aversions proceed from illusion, from its identifying itself with its per sc unconscious senses, faculties, and organism. Merit, no less than demerit, prolongs the series, and must be shunned as siu by the aspirant to extrication. The world, then, was pictured by the Indian sages as a series, bcginningless and endless, of bodies and environments, through which personal souls that is, the one soul illusively viewing itself as many pass. They pass through it for the fruition of their works, bhoga. The material of which it is built up at each period of evolution is the cosmical illusion, ajndna, avidyd, mdyd, prakriti. This is the principle by which soul mistakes itself for not-self, identifies itself with fictitious adjuncts, upddhi, with the organs, the faculties, the organism. It is this illusion that gives rise to the unreal world of duality, generable, mutable, corruptible, avidydparikalpitam dvaitam. It is illusion that projects the manifold of experience, ndndtvapratyupasthdpikd mdyd. As the flow of transmigratory experiences is a succession of pleasures, pains, and neutral states, the world-projecting illusion is defined to be pleasure, pain, and indolence in equilibrium, gmiatrayasamya. Pleasure, pain, indifference, are the three primordia rerum, the factors of experience, the three strands of the rope that holds the soul in bondage. The world-projecting illusion is further spoken of as the power of the Demiurgus, his all-creative power, "the power of the divine spirit latent in its constituent primordia." Thus Sankaracharya in his Bhashya on the Vedantasutra says : "Name and form (i.e., all that is heard and seen), the fictitious products of illusion, and the body of the omniscient Demiurgus, name and form, inexplicable as entity and as nonentity, the germs of the transmigratory series, are called the illusion, the power, the productiveness (prakriti} of the Demiurgus." This illusion is "neither existent nor non-existent, nor both in one, neither to be explained as entity or as nonentity, fictitiously proceeding from and to all eternity." It is the illusory adjunct, itpddhi, of Brahman. The internal and the external order of things are illusorily superposed (adhyasta, adhydropita] upon the one and only real, the impersonal self, by an illusion that has imagined itself from all eternity. To illustrate this in the figures of the Vedanta : -"As a spider extends and retracts his threads, as plants grow up upon the earth, as the hairs of the head and body spring from the living man, so the world arises from the imperishable." "As from the blazing fire its kindred sparks proceed in thousands, so the diverse creatures proceed from that imperishable principle and into it return." All that presents itself to the soul in life after life, in sphere after sphere, lies in fictitious semblance above the real, like the blueness seen in the sky, though in the sky it has no existence ; like the waters of a mirage ; like the bubbles on the surface of a river ; like the airy fabric of a day-dream ; like the visions of a dream ; like the silver seen, or seeming to be seen, on the shell of the pearl-oyster ; like the snake seen by the belated traveller in a piece of rope ; like the gloom that surrounds the owl amidst the noontide glare. The soul is confined to the body as within a prison. Its doings and sufferings are as unreal as the apparent motion of the trees upon the bank to one sailing down the river. The experience of life after life is the phantasrnagory of a waking dream. The unreality, the fictitious nature, of the things of experience is implied everywhere in the Upanishads, and explicated with a profusion of imagery, by the Indian schoolmen. The contents of this transmigratory series are supplied from the popular religion, the earlier imagery being built up into the new conception. A place is found in it for the deities and their paradises ; only these d_eities and their paradises, up to the Demiurgus himself, the Isvara, and the brah/naloka, the sphere of Brahma, are per se fictitious, unreal, illusory. A sojourn in these paradises is promised to the religionist ; assimilation to these deities is promised to those that worship them with knowledge as well as with rites. Every man, the Indian schoolmen say, shall be assimilated to the deity he worships. The highest reward of obedience to sacred prescription and of worship of the deities is continuance in the brahmaloka till the end of an a j on, "relative immortality," dpckshikam nityatvam. The only real immortality is extrication from metempsychosis, reunion with the impersonal self, to be reached not by works but b^ knowledge. They that delight in works, in rites, and the spheres won by works, wander in darkness, are like the blind led by the blind. Works and worship are, however, necessary to purify the intellect of the aspirant to extrication. The process of purification may go on through several successive lives. Good works performed without a view to recompense, and as an offering to the Demiurgus, pro duce that purity of the internal faculties which is requisite to the knowledge that terminates in liberation from metempsychosis. They are thus instrumental to emancipation. Good works are necessary, saj r s Sankaracharya, to the rise of the spiritual intuition ; they are unnecessary when it has once arisen. The qualified aspirant to liberation, the adhikdrin, must renounce all works, the good as well as the evil, for they serve only to prolong the series of his embodiments. It is thus that the popular religion is taken up and fitted into the Vedanta philosophy. Karmavidyd is preliminary to brahm avidyd. Maya, the inexplicable illusion, self-imagined, has been the unreal adjunct, upddhi, illusorily overspread upon Brahman from all eternity. Brahman in its first connexion with ignorance or illusion is the Demiurgus, Isvara, Paramesvara, the constructive and superintending deity of the Vediintins. Before describing the process of things at a period of evolution, the conception of Brahman, the impersonal self, must be unfolded in the terms of the Vedanta. Brahman is the one and real that underlies the many and ap

parent. It is ingenerable, immutable, incorruptible. It is the