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Updated: May 6, 2025
This view the Sutra rejects. Option only between the several meditations is possible, on account of the non-difference of result. For to all meditations on Brahman alike Scripture assigns one and the same result, viz. intuitive knowledge of Brahman, which is of the nature of supreme, unsurpassable bliss. Up.
The bhedabheda view is untenable. Take the judgment 'This is such and such'; how can we realise here the non-difference of 'being this' and 'being such and such'? The 'such and such' denotes a peculiar make characterised, e.g. by a dewlap, the 'this' denotes the thing distinguished by that peculiar make; the non-difference of these two is thus contradicted by immediate consciousness.
Should it be maintained that the texts declaring difference refer to difference due to limiting adjuncts, while the texts declaring non-difference mean essential non-difference, we must ask the following question does the non-conditioned Brahman know, or does it not know, the soul which is essentially non-different from it? If it does not know it, Brahman's omniscience has to be abandoned.
Brahman are these fishers, and so on; and as Brahman there is said to comprise within itself all individual souls, the passage teaches general non-difference of the Self. In order, then, that texts of both these classes may be taken in their primary, literal sense, we must admit that the individual soul is a part of Brahman.
But, an objection is raised, if on account of grammatical co-ordination and the resulting idea of oneness, the judgment 'this pot is clay' is taken to express the relation of difference, plus non-difference, we shall have analogously to infer from judgments such as 'I am a man', 'I am a divine being' that the Self and the body also stand in the bhedabheda-relation; the theory of the co-existence of difference and non-difference will thus act like a fire which a man has lit on his hearth, and which in the end consumes the entire house!
Texts which maintain the non-difference of a being which is knowing and another which is not knowing, if taken literally, convey a contradiction as if one were to say, 'Water the ground with fire'!-and must therefore be understood in some secondary metaphorical sense.
There is no command of the Lord to the effect that one aspect only should belong to each thing, non-difference to what is non-different, and difference to what is different. But one aspect only belongs to each thing, because it is thus that things are perceived! On the contrary, we reply, things have twofold aspects, just because it is thus that they are perceived.
In the case under discussion the genus constitutes the mode, and the individual that to which the mode belongs: the idea does not therefore possess the character of unity. For these very reasons the individual soul cannot stand to Brahman in the bhedabheda-relation. And as the view of non-difference is founded on Scripture, we assume that the view of difference rests on beginningless Nescience.
By the 'being' of a thing we understand the attribute of its being suitable for some definite practical effect; while its 'non-being' means its suitability for an effect of an opposite nature. For all these reasons non-difference can only have the meaning set forth by us. Here the following doubt may arise.
It is through the apprehension of difference only that the idea of non-difference comes to an end. Plurality is not unreal. Next as to the assertion that all difference presented in our cognition as of jars, pieces of cloth and the like is unreal because such difference does not persist.
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