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374 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY percept and every concept can be made to indicate the Absolute. The Upanişads prefer to direct our attention to it through terms like tvam or aham denoting the subject, for unlike other terms they, besides dispelling all doubt about its being, afford a better clue to its nature. When such terms are combined with another like tat or Brahman in an assertive proposition like Tat tvam asi or Aham Brahma asmi, the reference to Reality becomes ensured. For the attributes which they respectively connote of the individual and of the cosmic subject--such as the bondage of the one and the freedom of the other-being mutually incompatible, our mind abandons the explicit sense of the terms, and travels beyond those attributes to that in which they are grounded (nirvišeşa-vastu) as constituting the true import of the proposition. The dropping of these attributes, we should add, signifies little because they are but illusive barriers erected by Māyā between the jīva and Isvara. It should also be pointed out that we do not here identify the ground of one set of attributes with that of the other, for such identification would be meaningless without some difference equally real between them. To avoid this implication we merely deny the distinction between the two, so that what the proposition in strictness means is that the jīva is not other than Brahman.
The advaitic Absolute is not merely indefinable; we cannot know it either, for the moment it is made the object of thought it becomes related to a subject and therefore determinate. That is another important reason why the idea of Isvara or saguna Brahman is rejected as inadequate to be the true goal of philosophy which the Advaita, like the other Indian doctrines, views as not merely arriving at a speculative notion or a conceptual formula of the ultimate reality, but to realize what it is in itself. The ideal of the determinate
Cf. Naiskarmya-siddhi, iii. 100-3. All objects alike reveal being (sat) of some type or other. The subject which cognizes them reveals not only being but also thought (cit). Thus we may say that the Advaita recognizes kinds as well as degrees of reality. 1 As other examples of distinction between the two, we may mention the following: The jiva's knowledge has many limitations, while God is all-knowing: God is mediately known, while the jiva is immediately realized.
