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Xxxv11] Srīpati Pandita's Ideas and do not become merged in Brahman, as Sankara might lead us to suppose. For this reason, when we wake the next day, we have revived in our memory the experiences of the life before the sleep. This explains the continuity of our consciousness, punctuated by dreamless sleep every night. Otherwise if we had at any time merged into Brahman, it could not be possible for us to remember all our duties and responsibilities, as if there were no dreamless sleep and no break in our consciousness.
In discoursing on the nature of difference between swoon (mūrcchā) and death, Śrīpati says that in the state of unconsciousness in swoon, the mind becomes partially paralysed so far as its different functions are concerned. But in death the mind is wholly dissociated from the external world. It is well to remember the definition of death as given in the Bhāgavata Purāņa as being absolute forgetfulness (mrtyur atyanta-vismrti).
According to the view of Sankara, the Brahman is formless. Such a view does not suit the position of Vīrā-saivism as propounded by Śrīpati. So he raises the question as to whether the Siva, the formless, is the same as the Siva with the form as found in many Siva-lingas, and in reply Śrīpati emphasises the fact that Siva exists in two states, as the formless and as being endowed with form. It is the business of the devotee to realise that Siva is one identical being in and through all His forms and His formless aspect. It is in this way that the devotee merges himself into Siva, as rivers merge into the sea. The individual or the jīva is not in any sense illusory or a limitation of the infinite and formless nature into an apparent entity as the Sankarites would try to hold. The individual is real and the Brahman is real in both the aspects of form and formlessness. Through knowledge and devotion the individual merges into God, as rivers merge into the sea, into the reality which is both formless and endowed with manifold forms.
Vīra-saivism indeed is a kind of bhedābheda interpretation of the Brahma-sūtra. We have, in the other volumes of the present work, dealt with the bhedābheda interpretation, as made by Rāmānuja and Bhāskara from different angles. In the bhedābheda interpretation Rāmānuja regards the world and the souls as being organically dependent on God, who transcends the world of our experience. According to Bhāskara, the reality is like the ocean of which the world of experience is a part, just as the
