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Updated: May 6, 2025
The non-difference of the souls from each other and Brahman is thus essential, while their difference is due to the Upadhis. We therefore hold that the Upadhis are produced, in accordance with the actions of the individual souls, as essentially non-different and different from Brahman.
On the fourth alternative the individual soul is something altogether different from Brahman, and the difference of the soul from Brahman thus ceases to depend on the upadhis of Brahman. The conclusion from all this is that on the strength of the texts declaring non-difference we must admit that all difference is based on Nescience only.
The imagination, however, of the identity of the Self and the body is sublated by all the means of proof which apply to the Self: it is in fact no more valid than the imagination of the snake in the rope, and does not therefore prove the non-difference of the two.
The impossibility of such destruction was proved by us under II, 1, 14, where we showed that origination and destruction mean only the assumption of new states on the part of one and the same permanent substance, and therefrom proved the non-difference of the effect from the cause.
As the one air, according as it undergoes in the body different modifications, acquires a new name, new characteristics, and new functions, being then called prana, apana, and so on; thus the one Brahman becomes the world, with its manifold moving and non-moving beings. The non-difference of the world from Brahman, the highest cause, is thus fully established.
Here terminates the 'arambhana' adhikarana. 'Thou art that'; 'this Self is Brahman' these and similar texts which declare the non-difference of the world from Brahman, teach, as has been said before, at the same time the non-difference from Brahman of the individual soul also. But an objection here presents itself.
So far it has been shown that the non-difference of injunction, and so on, establishes the unity of meditations, and that owing to the latter the special features of meditation enjoined in different texts have to be combined.
The teacher, bearing in his mind the idea of Brahman constituting the sole cause of the entire world and of the non-difference of the effect from the cause, asks the pupil, 'Have you ever asked for that instruction by which the non-heard is heard, the non-perceived is perceived, the not known is known'; wherein there is implied the promise that, through the knowledge of Brahman the general cause, its effect, i.e. the whole Universe, will be known?
Those qualities, viz. being the richest, and so on, are to be meditated upon in the other place also, viz. in the meditation on Prana of the Kaushitakins; 'since there is non-difference of everything, i.e. since the text of the Kaushitakins also exhibits the very same method, in all its details, for proving what it is undertaken to prove, viz. that Prana is the oldest and best.
We do not perceive any non-existence of the jar different from the kind of non- existence described; and as the latter sufficiently accounts for all current ideas and expressions as to non-existence, there is no occasion to assume an additional kind of non-existence. Up. The next two Sutras confirm the doctrine of the non-difference of the effect from the cause by two illustrative instances.
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