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God and the World
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solved. It appears, therefore, that (so far as we can judge from his Siddhi-traya) Yamuna's main contribution consists in establishing the self-consciousness of the soul. The reality of the external world and the existence of Isvara had been accepted in previous systems also. Yāmuna thus gives us hardly any new ideas about Iśvara and His relation to the souls and the world. He does not make inquiry into the nature of the reality of the world, and rests content with proving that the world-appearance is not false, as the Sankarites supposed. He says in one place that he does not believe in the existence of the partless atoms of the Naiyāyikas. The smallest particle of matter is the trasareņu, the specks of dust that are found to move in the air when the sun's rays come in through a chink or hole. But he does not say anything more than this about the ultimate nature of the reality of the manifold world or how it has come to be what it is. He is also silent about the methods which a person should adopt for procuring his salvation, and the nature and characteristics of that state.
Yamuna, in his Agama-prāmānya, tried to establish that the Pañca-tātra-samhitā had the same validity as the Vedas, since it was uttered by Isvara himself. Vişnu, or Vāsudeva, has been praised in the Purusa-sūkta and in other places of the Vedas as the supreme Lord. The Pāśupata-tantra of the Saivas is never supported by the Vedas, and thus the validity of the Pāšupata-tantra cannot be compared with that of the Pañcarātra-samhitā.
God according to Rāmānuja, Venkatanātha
and Lokācārya. Bhāskara had said that, though Iśvara is possessed of all good qualities and is in Himself beyond all impurities, yet by His Sakti (power) He transformed Himself into this world, and, as all conditions and limitations, all matter and phenomena are but His power, it is He who by His power appears as an crdinary soul and at last obtains emancipation as well. Rāmānuja holds that on this view there is no essential form of Brahman which transcends the limits of all bonds, the power (Sakti) which manifests itself as all phenomena. Brahman, being always associated with the power which exists as the world-phenomena, becomes necessarily subject to all the defects of the phenomenal world. Moreover, when a Sakti, or power of Brahman, is admitted, how can Brahman be said
