Zend Avesta Part 01

SR No.: 007671
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1895
Total Pages: 2695
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 1978

CHAPTER XVIII, 18.
123
renouncers! Learn from me, O you of mighty arms! these five causes of the completion of all actions, declared in the Sankhya system. The substratum, the agent likewise, the various sorts of organs, and the various and distinct movements, and with these the deities, too, as the fifth. Whatever action, just or otherwise, a man performs with his body, speech, and mind, these five are its causes. That being so, the undiscerning man, who being of an unrefined understanding, sees the agent in the immaculate self, sees not (rightly). He who has no feeling of egoismo, and whose mind is not tainted, even though he kills (all) these people, kills not, is not fettered (by the action). Knowledge, the object of knowledge, the knower-threefold is the prompting to action. The instrument, the action, the agent, thus in brief is action threefold. Knowledge and action and agent
" The original is sannyasi, but Sridhara is probably right in taking 11 10 mean one who has command of abandonment.' Sankara and Madhus@dana, however, take the word in its ordinary sense of • ascetic.' What follows explains, says Sridhara, why the fruit does not accrue to renouncers.'
Saókara and Madhus@dana say this means Vedanta-sâstra. Sridhan suggests also the alternative Sänkhya-sastra. Substratum =ibe body, in which desire, aversion, &c. are manifested ; agent = one who egoistically thinks himself the doer of actions; organs = senses of perception, action, &c.; movements=of the vital breaths in tbe body; deities=the deities which preside over the eye and other senses (as to this cf. Aitareya-upanishad, p. 45; Prasna, pp. 216, 217; Mundaka, p. 314; Aitareya-áranyaka, pp. 88–370; and Max Muller's Hibbert Lectures, p. 304, note).
• Cf. p. 106. • Egoism=the feeling that be is the doer of the action; taint= the feeling that the fruit of the action must accrue to him.
. Cf. p. 45, and Dhammapada, stanz 394.
• Knowledge, i.e. that something is a means to what is desired; object is the means; the knower is he wbo has this knowledge. When these co-exist we have action. The instrument=snses,
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