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Updated: April 30, 2025
In reality the individual souls are non-different from Brahman, and hence essentially free from all impurity; but as they are liable to impurity caused by their limiting adjuncts in the same way as the face reflected in a mirror is liable to be dimmed by the dimness of the mirror they may be the abodes of Nescience and hence may be viewed as the figments of wrong imagination.
Not so, the Vaiseshika replies. Activity applied to a certain cause gives rise to those effects only the potentiality of which inheres in that cause. Now, against all this, the following objection is raised. The effect is non-different from the cause.
Because it is an effect; for we perceive that every effect is different from its special cause which has the same nature as the effect and at the same time is non-different. Such effected things as e.g. a jar and a gold ornament are different from their causes, i.e. clay and gold, which have the same nature as the effects, and at the same time non-different.
Now all these souls are deficient in insight into the true nature of the highest reality, their understandings being obscured by Nescience operating in the form of beginningless karman; and hence those texts only are fully useful to them which teach that there exists a highest Brahman which the souls in the state of release may cognise as non-different from themselves, and which then, through its own essential nature, qualities, power and energies, imparts to those souls bliss infinite and unsurpassable.
The texts referring to the two as non-different may thus be taken in their primary sense; for the part is only a limited place of that of which it is a part. And the texts referring to the two as different may also be taken in their primary sense; for the distinguishing attribute and that to which the attribute belongs are essentially different.
On the second alternative we have two aspects of different kind and an unknown thing supposed to be the substrate of those aspects; but this assumption of a triad of entities proves only their mutual difference of character, not their non- difference. And much less even are they able to do so if they are viewed as non-different from the thing which is their substrate.
The whole universe of things must be ordered in agreement with our cognitions. Now we are conscious of all things as different and non-different at the same time: they are non-different in their causal and generic aspects, and different in so far as viewed as effects and individuals.
Nor again can you uphold the assertion that all intelligent subjects are non-different, i.e. one, because we observe that whatever is other than a subject of cognition is non- intelligent; for this also is disproved by the fact of the plurality of intelligent subjects as proved by the individual distribution, among them, of pleasures and pains.
The meaning is: when the soul has attained the nature of Brahman, i.e. when it has freed itself from all false imagination, then it is non-different from the highest Self. This non-difference is due to the soul, as well as the highest Self, having the essential nature of uniform intelligence.
'that which is, that appears in different conditions, and it is in this sense that the world is non-different from Brahman. But this theory is really in conflict with all Scripture, Smriti, Itihasa, Purana and Reasoning. For Scripture, Smriti, Itihasa and Purana alike teach that there is one supreme cause, viz.
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