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GEORGE BURCH
held by Malkani, it is Atman. Individuality is a product of ignorance, and consequently the individual selves cannot be the ground of ignorance. There is therefore only one jiva." This theory is not quite like any Western monism. It is not like Eleaticism, for that is based on an analysis of being, while ekajivavada is based on an analysis of experience. It is not like neo-Platonism, for that recognizes degrees of reality subordinate to and emanating from the one absolute reality, while ekajivavada has no degrees and no emanation. It is not like solipsism, for that accepts the reality of one individual, while ekajivavada rejects all individuals, including myself, as equally unreal. When I wake from a dream I realize that the persons I met in the dream no longer exist, in fact never did exist, but I also realize that the person I remember myself to have been in the dream, with the body and behavior it had there, never did exist, but was just as illusory as the others. Likewise, when I attain freedom from ignorance (moksha) I shall realize, and even now I can understand intellectually, that the individual I called myself, with its body, mind, and ego, is just as unreal as other individuals. I can identify the true self with my self no more than with any other self. The only real individual, like that which finds itself awake after the dream, is that which finds itself really existing after the end of ignorance. It is this individual (jiva) which, by its ignorance, produces the illusion of many individuals, including itself as one among them. Malkani recognizes that this theory is paradoxical. In reply to my question, "If the jiva is one, what is many?” he stated that the very nature of jiva as Atman under the condition of ignorance requires it to be finite and so many, but that on the other hand jiva, being Atman, is essentially one. Jiva partakes both of self and of not-self: as self it is really one, but as not-self it appears to be many. The self (Atman or Brahman), limited by illusion, becomes, through false identification with the illusory body, the
23 Some contemporary Vedantists ridicule ekajivavada as a fantastic perversion of Advaita taught historically only by the obscure writer Prakashananda and currently only by Malkani. Several of the philosophers whom I met, however, upheld ekajivavada, some of them accepting the formula that there are many jivas empirically, one philosophically, none really.
