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XXXII] Status of the World
405 into being, He enters into it, controls it in every detail, and in the last stage (at the time of pralaya) He divests Himself of various forms of manifestation and returns to Himself as pure being, endowed with His own inherent power. Thus it is said in the Vişnu-purāņa that the ignorant, instead of perceiving the world as pure knowledge, are deluded by perceiving it as the visible and tangible world of objects; but those who are pure in heart and wise perceive the whole world as the nature of God, as pure consciousness.
Status of the World. Thus in the Vaişnava system the world is not false (like the rope-snake), but destructible (like a jug). The world has no reality; for, though it is not false, it has no uninterrupted existence in past, present and future; only that can be regarded as real which is neither false nor has only an interrupted existence in time. Such reality can only be affirmed of Paramātman or His power. The Upanişads say that in the beginning there existed ultimate Reality, sat; this term means the mutual identity of the subtle potential power of Brahman and the Brahman. The theory of satkāryavāda may be supposed to hold good with reference to the fact that it is the subtle power of God that manifests itself in diverse forms (sūkṣmāvasthā-laksaņa-tac-chaktiḥ). Now the question arises, whether, if the world has the ultimate sat as its material cause, it must be as indestructible as that; if the world is indestructible, then why should it not be false (like the conch-shell-silver) and, consequently, why should not the vivarta theory be regarded as valid? The reply to such a question is that to argue that, because anything is produced from the real (sat), therefore it must also be real (sat) is false, since this is not everywhere the case; it cannot be asserted that the qualities of the effect should be wholly identical with the qualities of the cause; the rays of light emanating from fire have not the power of burning? Śrīdhara, in his commentary on the Vişnupurāņa, asserting that Brahman has an unchangeable and a changeable form, explains the apparent incongruity in the possibility of the changeable coming out of the unchangeable on the
1 tato vivarta-vādinām iva rajju-sarpa-r'an na mithyātvam kintu ghata-van naśvaratvam eva tasya. tato mithyātvābhāve api tri-kālāryabhicārā-bhāvāj jagato na sattvam virarta-pariņāmāsiddhatvena tad-dosa-dvayābhāvavaty eva hi vastuni sattvam vidhiyate j'athā paramātmani tacchaktau vā. Ibid. p. 255.
? Ibid. p. 256.
