Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 44

The Absolate as...
There is another difference which is more fundamental. It is that in his very act of constructing the jiva-sāksins and the world of objects the 1śvara--sāksin is understcod equally also as not constructing it, understood, in other words, as enjoying his being - and that in fullest self-evidence - as just the sole solitary truth = pure impersonal consciousness, and nothing else. This is īśvara-sākşin evidencing himself as just the absolute, and for this he requires po extra labour, no extra discipline. The jiva-sākṣin too has, it is true, some such dual function: he constructs – rather, is made to construct - the world of objects and evider.ces himself at the same time as pure consciousness. But the pure consciousness as which he evidences himself is neither that īśvara-sāksin nor the impersonal absolute as they are in themselves : he evidences himself as delimited consciousness, as an individual subjectivity which he is. What it all means is that the jiva-sākşin is still unfree in the sense that experiencing himself as limited he experiences at the same time that this limitation is a fault and experiences, therefore, a demand to dissociate himself from the fault at some later stage of experience. Till then the jiva-sāksin does not know himself as absolute, though he knows himself very well as pure subjectivity and even as delimited pure consciousness. While, thus, all the distinction that there is between the īśvara. sākşin and Brahman is just functional, nothing ontological - the same principle alternatively experiencing itself as Brahman and the iśvara-sākṣin this cannot be said of the jiya-sākṣin. "The distinction of the jiva-sākşin from the Îśvara-sākşin and a fortiriori from Brahman is of profound ontological import.
We have given above the more important of the two senses in which the term Išvara (God) is used in the Advaita literature. The other sense is much naiver, though, strangely enough, often popular among later Vedantic scholars. In this other sense, God is what ordinary man has made of the absolute. He is how the jiva (not the jiva-sākṣin), with all his (the jiva's) fusion with the mind-body complex and entanglement, through that, with the world of physical things, under