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INTRODUCTION,
LXXIX
an individual is concerned, the Jīvan-muktāvasthā of Sãmkhya and Vedānta, in which Ātman has been Brahman but is waiting till the journey of the mortal body is over and the upādhis are mitigated; in this condition there are no pains, no actions good or bad. So far as its blissful aspect is concerned, it is similar to Upanisadic Turīyāvasthā where self-conscious bliss is attained. This state of Brahmānanda is set forth in Taittirīyopanışad with an attempt to measuie the bliss with empirical standards; we get there the perfect identity of Brahman and Atman, and in the end there is a classical passage recording the ecstatic echo of the aspirant who is one with Brahman. This aspect of omniscience, in fact, partly encroaches on the realm of religious mysticism.
OMNISCIENCE COMPARED WITH RADHAKRISHNAN'S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. This spiritual life of omniscience and omnibliss is almost exactly the same as what Radhakrishnan calls Religious experience. It is a positive spiritual state of self-transcendence; there the individual acts by his whole being, by the totality of his faculties and energies; it is not the result of unconscious. perversion but of spiritual. super-consciousness; there is the response of the whole to the whole; and therein 'thought and reality coalesce and a creative merging of subject and object results. This religious experience is full of joy and peace. But there is a point of difference: this religious experience, according to Radhakrishnan, is a temporary state and not exercised continuously at the level of everyday experience, while omniscience when once attained cannot be parted with, because it is the essential manifestation of the entire spirit. "The soul of man' as Joad puts it 'is like a chrysalis maturing in the cocoon of matter from which one day it will burst forth and spread its wings in the sun of pure reality'.5 This direct spiritual experience is a self-guaranteed vision and hence accepted as the foundation of religion; that is exactly the reason why Jaina and Buddhist prophets are claimed to be Sarvajñas.
NECESSITY AND PROOF OF OMNISCIENCE.—This doctrine of Sarvaiñatā has been a bone of contention between different schoolmen; the problem is twofold: first, whether omniscience is humanly possible, and secondly, whether so and so is omniscient. The Indian philosophical systems that accept Veda as a self-guaranteed authority have totally denied the first part and partially the second. Jainism and Buddhism, with whom Veda has never been an authority perhaps for racial and geographical reasons, accept the first part but differ among themselves on the second point: that is but natural. They have struggled hard to prove and to establish the omniscience of their
1 Sāmlhyahārkā 67. 2 Belvalkar. Basu Mallika Lectures pp. 66-8. 3 Ranade: Constructive Sur rey of Upa. Phil. pp. 335 etc. 4 An Idealistic view of Life pp. 84 etc.; also Counter Attack from the East by C. E, M, Joad
pp. 79 etc. This statement of Joad reads like a gūthū of Kundakunda rewritten. It only means that in the interpretation of Reality the denominational religions, with which our relations are determined by the accidents of time and place, disappear into one Religion pf transcendental experience of the Real,
