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 1865

I ADHYAYA, 2 PÂDA, 21.
135
Self within is one only; two internal Selfs are not possible. But owing to its limiting adjunct the one Self is practically treated as if it were two; just as we make a distinction between the ether of the jar and the universal ether. Hence there is room for those scriptural passages which set forth the distinction of knower and object of knowledge, for perception and the other means of proof, for the intuitive knowledge of the apparent world, and for that part of Scripture which contains injunctions and prohibitions. In accordance with this, the scriptural passage, Where there is duality, as it were, there one sees another,' declares that the whole practical world exists only in the sphere of Nescience; while the subsequent passage, But when the Self only is all this, how should he see another?' declares that the practical world vanishes in the sphere of true knowledge.
21. That which possesses the attributes of invisibility and so on (is Brahman), on account of the declaration of attributes.
Scripture says, 'The higher knowledge is this by which the Indestructible is apprehended. That which cannot be seen nor seized, which is without origin and qualities, without eyes and ears, without hands and feet, the eternal, all-pervading, omnipresent, infinitesimal, that which is imperishable, that it is which the wise regard as the source of all beings' (Mu. Up. I, 1, 5; 6). Here the doubt arises whether the source of all beings which is spoken of as characterised by invisibility, &c. be the pradhâna, or the embodied soul, or the highest Lord.
We must, the purvapakshin says, understand by the source of all beings the non-intelligent pradhâna because (in the passage immediately subsequent to the one quoted) only non-intelligent beings are mentioned as parallel instances. As the spider sends forth and draws in its thread, as plants grow on the earth, as from the living man hairs spring forth on the head and the body, thus everything arises here from the Indestructible.'—But, it
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