Questions of King Milinda Part 01

SR No.: 007681
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1890
Total Pages: 2695
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 47 MB

Page 465

I 2
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
ment, viz. 'From air there sprang fire.' Now with regard to the question whether ether or fire were created first, neither option nor addition are permissible, because the former is impossible in itself, and the latter non-admitted by the texts?. Hence the two scriptural passages are not contradictory.—Moreover, in order to justify the promise made in the Khåndogya in the beginning of the chapter ('That instruction by which we hear what is not heard '), we have to count the ether, although 'not heard' (i. e. not mentioned in the text) among the things produced; how much more impossible then is it for us not to accept the statement actually made about the ether in the Taittirîyakal-To the assertion, made above by the purvapakshin, that the ether as occupying the same space with everything is known together with Brahman and its effects, and that thus the assertion (of everything being known through Brahman) is not contradicted; and that moreover the scriptural passage 'one only, without a second' is not contradicted, because Brahman and the ether may be considered as non-separate, like milk and water, we make the following reply. That knowledge of everything through the knowledge of one thing (of which scripture speaks) cannot be explained through the analogy of milk mixed with water, because we understand from the parallel instance of a piece of clay being brought forward (Kh. Up. VI, 1, 4) that the knowledge of everything has to be explained through the relation of the material cause and the material effect (the knowledge of the cause implying the knowledge of the effect). Moreover, the knowledge of everything, if assumed to be analogous to the case of the knowledge of milk and water, could not be called a perfect knowledge (samyag-vigñana), because the water which is
* An optional proceeding, i.e. the doctrine that either ether or fire was the first product is impossible because only actions to be done, not existing things, fall within the sphere of option; addition, i.e. the fact of fire and ether together being the first creation is not admitted by scripture, which teaches a successive creation of the elements.
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