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Updated: June 14, 2025
It looks perilous; it raises its isolation to a giddy height and casts a black shadow upon the fair face of existence; from the outside it has an aspect of a sudden disruption, rebellious and destructive; it is proud, domineering and wayward; it is ready to rob the world of all its wealth to gratify its craving of a moment; to pluck with a reckless, cruel hand all the plumes from the divine bird of beauty to deck its ugliness for a day; indeed man's legend has it that it bears the black mark of disobedience stamped on its forehead for ever; but still all this maya, envelopment of avidya; it is the mist, it is not the sun; it is the black smoke that presages the fire of love.
It thus follows that the distinctions of one's own self and other persons, of souls bound and released, of pupils and teachers, and so on, are fictitiously created by the avidya of one intelligent subject. The fact is that the upholder of Duality himself is not able to account for the distinction of souls bound and released.
It is that creature-Soul which is Iswara, pervading everything in the universe. It is Iswara that hath ordained sacrifices. Souls divested of accidents, resorting to Avidya, which is like unto a tree of golden foliage, assume accidents, and take births in different orders according to their propensities. Those accidents also, in their Fulness, arise from Brahman in its Fulness.
Other bodies also are fictitiously shaped by my avidya; for they are bodies or effects, or non-intelligent or fictitious creations, as this my body is. The whole class of intelligent subjects is nothing but me; for they are of intelligent nature; what is not me is seen to be of non-intelligent nature; as e.g. jars.
In the subsequent verses Vidya and Avidya are used in something the same sense as "faith" and "works" in the Christian Bible; neither alone can lead to the ultimate goal, but when taken together they carry one to the Highest. Work done with unselfish motive purifies the mind and enables man to perceive his undying nature.
His abodes always resulting from Avidya, desire, and acts, he migrates from body to body, abandoning one after another repeatedly, urged on by Time, like a person abandoning house after house in succession. This Jiva is no one's relation; there is none again that may be said to belong to him. He is always alone, and he himself creates his own body and his own happiness and misery.
""Vyasa said, 'Brahma is the effulgent seed from which, existing as it does by itself, hath sprung the whole universe consisting of two kinds of being, viz., the mobile and the immobile. At the dawn of His day, waking up, He creates with the help of Avidya this universe. At first springs up that which is called Mahat. That Mahat is speedily transformed into Mind which is the soul of the Manifest.
When, therefore, the text attributes to the soul freedom from evil and the rest, it does not mean to predicate of it further positive qualities, but only to exclude all the qualities depending on avidya change, pleasure, pain, and so on For these reasons Audulomi holds that the released soul manifests itself as mere intelligence.
In the last the symbol of death has been used for expressing the idea of man's deliverance from the life which is not true. This is the same as Nirvnana, the symbol of the extinction of the lamp. In the typical thought of India it is held that the true deliverance of man is the deliverance from avidya, from ignorance.
That dissociation of the Soul from the understanding and the mind with the senses, which quickly disappears, which has no stability, and which the mind causes to arise only when influenced by darkness, is felicity that partakes, as the learned say, of the nature of darkness and is experienced in this gross body only. In some, that are overwhelmed by Avidya, these exist, firmly grafted with them.
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