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mn] Brahman in the Upanisads
49 world is his body, yet he is the soul within. “He creates all, wills all, smells all, tastes all, he has pervaded all, silent and unaffected". He is below, above, in the back, in front, in the south and in the north, he is all this?. “These rivers in the east and in the west originating from the ocean, return back into it and become the ocean themselves, though they do not know that they are so. So also all these people coming into being from the Being do not know that they have come from the Being.... That which is the subtlest that is the self, that is all this, the truth, that self thou art O Svetaketu 3.” “Brahman," as Deussen points out, "was regarded as the cause antecedent in time, and the universe as the effect proceeding from it; the inner dependence of the universe on Brahman and its essential identity with him was represented as a creation of the universe by and out of Brahman.” Thus it is said in Mund. I. 1.7: .
As a spider ejects and retracts (the threads), As the plants shoot forth on the earth, As the hairs on the head and body of the living man, So from the imperishable all that is here. As the sparks from the well-kindled fire, In nature akin to it, spring forth in their thousands, So, my dear sir, from the imperishable Living beings of many kinds go forth,
And again return into him Yet this world principle is the dearest to us and the highest teaching of the Upanişads is “That art thou.”
Again the growth of the doctrine that Brahman is the “inner controller" in all the parts and forces of nature and of mankind as the ātman thereof, and that all the effects of the universe are the result of his commands which no one can outstep, gave rise to a theistic current of thought in which Brahman is held as standing aloof as God and controlling the world. It is by his ordaining, it is said, that the sun and moon are held together, and the sky and earth stand held togethers. God and soul are distinguished again in the famous verse of Svetāśvatara 6:
Two bright-feathered bosom friends Flit around one and the same tree; One of them tastes the sweet berries,
The other without eating merely gazes down. i Cha. III. 14. 4. 2 Ibid. VII. 25. J; also Mundaka II. 2. II. 8 Chā. vi. 10. * Deussen's translation in Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 164. 5 Běh. 111. 8. 1.
6 Svetāśvatara Iv. 6, and Mundaka 111. I. 1, also Deussen's translation in Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 177.
