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CX11
SAMAYASARA
distinct from and incompatible with Self or Brahman. This would have landed him in a dualism which he streneously tries to avoid. Thus the problem with him was to retain the Sankhyan dualism just to emphasise the distinction between the subject and object and at the same time to maintain Vedantic monism In this attempt at a compromise his language becomes ambiguous and his own attitudewavers between Dualism and monism. He satisfied himself by introducing two kinds of existence or sat corresponding to Purusha and Prakriti and yet these two kinds of Sat he wants to derive from the Chetana Brahman Beyond the Brahman there could be no existence, he being the only sat as well as the only Chit. Hence the Prakriti which Sankara requisitions to explain the external world is not only achit, non-thought, but also asat-non-real. Being asat in as much as it is distinct from Brahman it must be identical with mere nothing and yet it must be substantial enough to be the basis of the objectvie world. It is such an impossible function assigned to Maya by Sankara He cannot condemn it altogether to be nothing for he expects real work out of it and so far it must have some causal potency. But on this account he dare not recognise its reality lest it should set up an imperium in imperio a rival claimant to the throne of Brahman. Therefore Sankara relegates Maya to the metaphysical purgatory where it is expected to live the life of something midway between absolute being and absolute nothing. What he further means by this curious amalgam of something-nothing we do not clearly appreciate. It is because of this precarious reality of Maya that he is able to make his readers believe that in his monism the objective reality maintains a greater dignity than assigned to it by the Buddhists. In short to avoid the sunyavada Sankara invents the impossible doctrine of maya which lends plausibility to his system which would other wise be untenable and also indistinguishable from Buddhistic nihilism. It was because of this indistinguishability between Buddhism and advaitism that Indian critics condemned advaita as Buddhistic nihilism in camouflage and called Sankara a Pracchanaa Bouddha, a bouddha in disguise.
Brahman: Sat as well as Chit, Existence and Intelligence, but for Vedantin it is something more. It is not merely the subs
