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Vedanta says, do not waste your valuable time in thinking of your past lives, do not look backward during the tiresome journey through the different stages of evolution, always look forward and try first to attain to the highest point of spiritual development; then if you want to know your past lives you will recollect them all. Nothing will remain unknown to you, the Knower of the universe.
Thereafter comes the completion of the series of transformations of the three nature potencies, since their purpose is attained. It is a part of the beauty and wisdom of the great Indian teachings, the Vedanta and the Yoga alike, to hold that all life exists for the purposes of Soul, for the making of the spiritual man.
He was perhaps the first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of thought was not new: it was the result of applying to the external world the same destructive logic which Gotama applied to the soul and the result had considerable analogies to Śankara's version of the Vedanta.
The truth of this theory, as of all theories respecting ghosts and spirits, seems to me a matter for experimental verification, but the Vedânta recognizes that in our experience a personal individual existence is always connected with a physical substratum.
As Professor Max Mueller states in his lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy: "One feels certain that behind all these lightning-flashes of religious and philosophic thought there is a distant past, a dark background of which we shall never know the beginning."
On the whole it may be said that Sankara is a thorough-going Vedantist and pantheist. Ramanuga, on the other hand, has leanings towards the dualism of the Sankhya philosophy, and endeavours to make the Vedanta Sutras support his opinions. These Sutras are of the utmost importance, as nearly all Hindu sects base their belief and practices on them.
He wrote popular hymns as well as commentaries on the Upanishads, Vedânta Sutras and Bhagavad-gîtâ, thus recognizing both Vedic and post-Vedic literature: he resided for some time on the Narbudda and at Benares, and in the course of the journeys in which like Paul he gave vent to his activity, he founded four maṭhs or monasteries, at Sringeri, Puri, Dwârakâ and Badrinath in the Himalaya.
In any case it is closely related to old ideas about the magic power of Vedic verses. The five Jinas and other supernatural personages are often regarded as manifestations of a single Buddha-force and at last this force is personified as Âdi-Buddha. But another form in which the Buddha-force is impersonal and analogous to the Parabrahma of the Vedânta is much older.
For strictly speaking the bondage does not exist: it is caused by want of discrimination. Like the Vedânta, the Sâṅkhya regards all this troubled life as being, so far as the soul is concerned, mere illusion.
A people among whom the Vedânta could obtain a large following must have been prone to think little of the things which we see compared with the unseen of which they are the manifestation. It is, therefore, not surprising if materialism met with small sympathy or success among them.
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