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THE DOCTRINE OF LIBERATION IN INDIAN RELIGIONS
good qualities and devoid of all evil qualities. He is the Highest Person, the Real of reals, the Light of lights and higher than the highest. He is of the nature of pure knowledge, absolute bliss, infinite power, ever pure, full of freedom and absolutely self-sufficient. This brahman is the controller of the individual souls and the world. God is identitical with the absolute brahman. The whole universe and all the souls form His body. He creates, controls, sustains and destroys this world. He has a special divine body (aprāk rta dehavisişta).
Rāmānuja refutes Samkara's conception of nirguna brahman as "a pure unqualified existence." According to him there is no proof for such an unqualified substance. No sense organ can prove the existence-in-itself. The word (sabda) cannot be a means of knowledge for a substance devoid of all difference. Perception (pratyakşa) proves difference and cannot be a means of knowledge for a thing devoid of difference. It does not reveal mere being. 83 Thus these is n of scripture, logic and personal experience for Samkara's notion of nirguna brahman. Rāmānuja points out that the scriptural passage "one without a second” really teaches that the brahman is possessed of manifold qualities. "If it were meant absolutely to deny all duality, it would deny also the eternity and other attributes of brahman." He further quotes the passage, “He who knows the bliss of that brahman from whence all speech, together with the mind, turns away unable to reach it" does not prove a substance devoid of all differences but with the possession of infinite nature of brahman's auspicious qualities.84
Rāmānuja did not believe that this world is false (mithya) as Samkara held. For Samkara, brahman is the ground for the creation of this world through His māyā. This entire world with all its differences, is owing to a certain defect and that defect is beginningless māyā or avidyā or ignorance. This theory of māyā or avidyā cannot be proved either by being or non-being. It is altogether inconclusive. We cannot say either of brahman or the individual ātman as the substrate of avidyā. Rāmānuja holds that ātman or brahman whose essential nature is knowledge, cannot be the substrate of ignorance, hence the theory involves a flat contradiction.85
83.
84.
The Vedanta Sutras with the commentary of Rāmánuja, translated by George Thibaut, 1.1.1. See Radhakrishnan and C.A. Moore, A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, pp. 543-545 Rāmānuja on The Vedantasūtra, 1.1.1; see also A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, p. 548. ibid, p. 550.
85.
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