Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 39

A Modern Understanding of...
body complexes are transcended the pure consciousnesses arrived at are still each individual.
In the absence of any contrary suggestion, I, you and he even as pure subjectivity, are each so far individual, even though the individuality of the mind-body complex has in each case been transcended. Indian transcendentalists are mostly at one in this thesis. Only the Buddhists and ekajiva. vadins have disagreed. Even the bahujīravādi Advaitins admit the plurality of jīvasāksins. Some of these transcedentalists who believe in the plurality of pure selves---we mean the Sāmkhya-Yoga philosophers, the Vaisnavas and some Saivashave stopped with this plurality, never attempting their merger in a Great one; and some, like the bahujivavādi Advaitins and most of the Saivas, have advocated the merger. Though the bahujīvavādi Advaitins admit the plurality of Jīva-sāksins they hold yet that this plurality is as transcendable as that of other things. If plurality in other cases was only a mode of symbolic representation nāmarūpa, so is the case here too. Even jīvasākşin - and, therefore, its plurality-is a symbolic representation of one undifferenced absolute pure consciousness, and the jīvasākşin, by transcending its individuality, may pass on to that. But how exactly ?
In religious attitude man does, as a matter of fact, withdraw, or at least seeks to withdraw, from his individuality. Through whatever degree of self-abnegation he comes to be in communion with a supreme over-personals self called God. This over-personal self is understood, in the minimum, as the most perfect ideal without any blemish or limitation any. 5 Over-personal in the sense that God transcends the individual I, you
and he who are normally called persons. Otherwise, however, the God of religion is himself a person in the sense of being a unit of consciousness, though even as a unit it is limltless, freely, i.e. symbolically or creatively, granting unithood tɔ iadividual subjects or somehow comprehending them.