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INTEGRITY AND INTEGRATION spiritually all-embracing and self-contained; thou art a portion of that,' an intelligent person abandons the mistake of supposing himself to be a manifestation or product of praksti, and cleaves to his own intrinsic being (svasvarūpun). He then says to himself: 'Since I am the son of Brahiman, I am myself Brahman. I am not something different from Brahman, even though caught in this bondage of the round of birth and death.'” 27
In this version of the ancient tale the figure is expressed according to the nondual formula of Vedānta: Thou art That (tat tvam asi). “Thou art the universal, only Self, though unaware of it." This is the Buddhist message too: "All things are Buddhathings." 28 Samsāra, the realm of birth and death, is but a vast, spread-out illusion, a cosmic dream from which one must awake. Cast away, therefore, this state of ignorance, be rid of the notion that thou art an outcaste in the wilderness. Mount thy proper throne. This is also the lesson of Sānkhya and Yoga-but here, as we have already seen, the puruşa is not identificd with the “First Puruşa” (ādipuruṣa), the Primal Man, the World Ground (Brahman), but is detached, isolated, and omnipotent, because alone.
The King's Son becomes aware of what he has always been unconsciously. Nothing changes in the sphere of facts; only consciousness, his notion of what he is, becomes transformed. The instant he acquires "discriminating knowledge” (viveka) a distinction is revealed between his true nature and the accidental mask that he took on as a member of his wild and outcaste hunting tribe-like the realization experienced by the tiger-fosterling among the goats. Accepting the reality of his character as now perceived, the King's Son recovers himself and becomes isolated (kaivalya) from the earlier biography and all that it contained,
27 Compare Calderón's seventeenth-century Spanish version of the story of the King's Son in his celebrated play, La Vida es Sueño, “Life Is a Dream."
28 Vajracchedikā 19. Cf. infra, pp. 545-546. 20 Cf. supra, pp. 5-8.
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