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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
Vedanta (S'amkara)
the individual soul is unreal and fictitious. In fact, there is no bondage and no release. Bondage is caused by nescience when one imagines oneself to be separate from the Brahman.' The soul is naturally infinite and continuous and all distinctions and limitations are superimposed upon it by the individual soul out of ignorance.
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The earthly life is always painful and therefore the earthly beings aspire to flee away permanently from the earthly life. But according to S'amkara, the pain is real only for the individual souls who possess body and sense organs. The Brahman or the supreme self is pure and it is eternally free from all kinds of experiences, painful as well as pleasurable. Pain is unreal to it; it is always full of the divine bliss. S'amkara says that the pain of the individual soul also is not real, but is imaginary and it is caused by the error consisting in the nondiscrimination of (the self from) the body, senses and other limiting adjuncts, which are due to name and form, the effects of Nescience.2 Pain does not really exist. It cannot exist in the self for to the self nothing sticks. It is full of perfect bliss and it is incompatible with the existence of pain which is caused by finitude. S'amkara describes the apparent or illusory nature of pain in the following passage"Just as the light of the sun or the moon which pervades the entire space becomes straight or bent
For Private And Personal
1 S'amkara (Com.) on Vedanta Sutras. Tr. Thibaut, 3.2.5, Vol. II, p. 139.
2 Ibid. 2.3.56, Vol. II, p. 64.
| SR No. | 020053 |
| Book Title | tman_and_moksa |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | G N Joshi |
| Publisher | Gujarat University |
| Publication Year | 1965 |
| Total Pages | 901 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 12 MB |