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Updated: June 2, 2025
For as a matter of fact all Vedanta-texts distinctly declare that the entire world, subtle or gross, material or spiritual, stands to the highest Self in the relation of a body.
To this bhedabheda view the Purvapakshin now objects on the following grounds: The whole aggregate of Vedanta-texts aims at enjoining meditation on a non-dual Brahman whose essence is reality, intelligence, and bliss, and thus sets forth the view of non-difference; while on the other hand the karma-section of the Veda, and likewise perception and the other means of knowledge, intimate the view of the difference of things.
We admit that release consists only in the cessation of Nescience, and that this cessation results entirely from the knowledge of Brahman. But a distinction has here to be made regarding the nature of this knowledge which the Vedanta-texts aim at enjoining for the purpose of putting an end to Nescience.
Now it is a contradiction to say that Brahman is connected with all this and at the same time antagonistic to it! Nor can we allow you to say that there is no real contradiction because that appearance is something false. For whatever is false belongs to that group of things contrary to man's true interest, for the destruction of which the Vedanta-texts are studied.
That Brahman is a treasure as it were of all blessed qualities and free from all imperfections, the whole body of Vedanta-texts clearly declares: 'That highest great lord of lords, that highest deity of deities'; 'He is the cause, the lord of the lords of the organs, and there is of him neither parent nor lord ; 'There is no effect and no cause known of him, no one is seen like unto him or higher.
The repetition of the word 'explained' is meant to indicate the termination of the adhyaya. The first adhyaya has established the truth that what the Vedanta-texts teach is a Supreme Brahman, which is something different as well from non-sentient matter known through the ordinary means of proof, viz.
But in the Vedanta-texts there are enjoined meditations on the Udgitha and the like which are matters auxiliary to works; and such meditations are not possible for him who is not acquainted with those works! You who raise this objection clearly are ignorant of what kind of knowledge the Sariraka Mimamsa is concerned with!
Analogously we have to understand, as the thing intimated by Vedanta-texts in the form of coordination, Brahman as possessing such and such attributes.
Even if, he says, we allow the Vedanta-texts to have a purport in so far as they are supplementary to injunctions of meditation, they cannot be viewed as valid means of knowledge with regard to Brahman. Do the texts referring to Brahman, we ask, occupy the position of valid means of knowledge in so far as they form a syntactic whole with the injunctions of meditation, or as independent sentences?
We have pointed out that the position of scripture as an authoritative means of knowledge is established by the fact that all the Vedanta-texts connectedly refer to the highest Brahman, which, although not related to any injunctions of action or abstention from action, by its own essential nature constitutes the highest end of man.
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