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xx] Ontological position of Rāmānuja's Philosophy 197 not essentially appertain to Brahman and an inquiry into the nature of Brahman does not mean that he is to be known as being associated with these qualities?. Bhāskara had asserted that Brahman had transformed Himself into the world-order, and that this was a real transformation-pariņāma-a transformation of His energies into the manifold universe. But Prakāśātman, in rejecting the view of pariņāma, says that, even though the world-appearance be of the stuff of māyā, since this māyā is associated with Brahman, the worldappearance as such is never found to be contradicted or negated or to be non-existing--it is only found that it is not ultimately reala. Māyā is supported in Brahman; and the world-appearance, being transformations of māyā, is real only as such transformations. It is grounded also in Brahman, but its ultimate reality is only so far as this ground or Brahman is concerned. So far as the world-appearances are concerned, they are only relatively real as māyā transformations. The conception of the joint causality of Brahman and māyā may be made in three ways; that māyā and Brahman are like two threads twisted together into one thread; or that Brahman, with māyā as its power or sakti, is the cause of the world; or that Brahman, being the support of māyā, is indirectly the cause of the world. On the latter two views māyā being dependent on Brahman, the work of māyā—the world is also dependent on Brahman; and on these two views, by an interpretation like this, pure Brahman (śuddha-brahma) is the cause of the world. Sarvajñātma muni, who also thinks that pure Brahman is the material cause, conceives the function of māyā not as being joint material cause with Brahman, but as the instrument or the means through which the causality of pure Brahman appears as the manifold and diversity of the universe. But even on this view the stuff of the diversity is the māyā, though such a manifestation of māyā would have been impossible if the ground-cause, the Brahman, had been absent4. In discerning the nature of the causality of Brahman, Prakāśātman says that the monistic doctrine of Vedānta is upheld by the fact that apart from
I na hi nānā-vidha-karya-kriyāveśātmakatvam tat-prasava-sakty-ātmakatvam vā jijñāsya-visuddha-brahmantargatam bhavitum arhati. Pañca-pădikā-vivarana, p. 205.
2 systeś ca svopādhau abhāva-vyāvrttatvāt sarve ca sopādhika-dharmāh svāśrayopādhau abādhyatayā satyā bhavanti srştir api svarūpena na bādhyate kintu paramā-rtha-satyatvā-mśena. Ibid. p. 206.
3 Ibid. p. 212. 4 Sanksepa-śārīraka, 1. 332, 334, and the commentary Anvayārtha-prakāśikā by Rāmatirtha.
