Zend Avesta Part 03

SR No.: 007673
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1887
Total Pages: 2618
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 1718

cxvi
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
mentary disciplines contrasted as inferior with the knowledge of the Self; to which latter distinction the Mundaka Up. (1, 4) applies the terms aparâ and parâ vidya. But a formal recognition of the essential difference of Brahman being viewed, on the one hand, as possessing distinctive attributes, and, on the other hand, as devoid of all such attributes is not to be met with anywhere. Brahman is indeed sometimes described as saguna and sometimes as nirguna (to use later terms); but it is nowhere said that thereon rests a distinction of two different kinds of knowledge leading to altogether different results. The knowledge of Brahman is one, under whatever aspects it is viewed; hence the circumstance (already exemplified above) that in the same vidyâs it is spoken of as saguna as well as nirguna. When the mind of the writer dwells on the fact that Brahman is that froin which all this world originates, and in which it rests, he naturally applies to it distinctive attributes pointing at its relation to the world; Brahman, then, is called the Self and life of all, the inward ruler, the omniscient Lord, and so on. When, on the other hand, the author follows out the idea that Brahman may be viewed in itself as the mysterious reality of which the whole expanse of the world is only an outward manifestation, then it strikes him that no idea or term derived from sensible experience can rightly be applied to it, that nothing more may be predicated of it but that it is neither this nor that. But these are only two aspects of the cognition of one and the same entity.
Closely connected with the question as to the double nature of the Brahman of the Upanishads is the question as to their teaching Mâyâ.--From Colebrooke downwards the majority of European writers have inclined towards the opinion that the doctrine of Mâyâ, i.e. of the unreal illusory character of the sensible world, does not constitute a feature of the primitive 'philosophy of the Upanishads, but was introduced into the system at some later period, whether by Bådarayana or Sankara or somebody else. The opposite view, viz. that the doctrine of Mâyâ forms an integral element of the teaching of the Upanishads, is implied in them everywhere, and enunciated more or less distinctly in
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