________________
I ADHYAYA, 3 PÂDA, 19.
185
which qualifies gîva, the individual soul, with reference to its previous condition 1.. -The meaning is as follows. Pragâpati speaks at first of the seer characterised by the eye (That person which is within the eye,' &c.); shows thereupon, in the passage treating of (the reflection in) the waterpan, that he (viz. the seer) has not his true Self in the body; refers to him repeatedly as the subject to be explained (in the clauses 'I shall explain him further to you'); and having then spoken of him as subject to the states of dreaming and deep sleep, finally explains the individual soul in its real nature, i. e. in so far as it is the highest Brahman, not in so far as it is individual soul (As soon as it has approached the highest light it appears in its own form'). The highest light mentioned, in the passage last quoted, as what is to be approached, is nothing else but the highest Brahman, which is distinguished by such attributes as freeness from sin, and the like. That same highest Brahman constitutes -as we know from passages such as that art thou '-the real nature of the individual soul, while its second nature, i. e. that aspect of it which depends on fictitious limiting conditions, is not its real nature. For as long as the individual soul does not free itself from Nescience in the form of duality-which Nescience may be compared to the mistake of him who in the twilight mistakes a post for a man-and does not rise to the knowledge of the Self, whose nature is unchangeable, eternal Cognition-which expresses itself in the form 'I am Brahman -so long it remains the individual soul. But when, discarding the aggregate of body, senseorgans and mind, it arrives, by means of Scripture, at the knowledge that it is not itself that aggregate, that it does not form part of transmigratory existence, but is the True, the Real, the Self, whose nature is pure intelligence; then
The masculine 'âvirbhûtasvarûpah' qualifies the substantive gîvah which has to be supplied. Properly speaking the gîva whose true nature has become manifest, i. e. which has become Brahman, is no longer gîva; hence the explanatory statement that the term gîva is used with reference to what the giva was before it became Brahman.
Digitized by Google
