Book Title: Satapatha Bramhana Part 05
Author(s): Julius Eggeling
Publisher: Oxford


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Page 1258
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VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
So
that consciousness is not consciousness; for there are things -e.g. sky-flowers, which are not objects of consciousness and at the same time are not consciousness. You will perhaps reply to this that a sky-flower's not being consciousness is due not to its not being an object of consciousness, but to its non-existence l-Well then, we rejoin, let us say analogously that the reason of jars and the like not being contradictory to Nescience (i. e. of their being gada), is their not being of the nature of consciousness, and let us not have recourse to their being objects of consciousness - But if consciousness is an object of consciousness, we conclude that it also is non-contradictory of Nescience, like a jar -At this conclusion, we rejoin, you may arrive even on the opposite assumption, reasoning as follows: 'Consciousness is non-contradictory of Nescience, because it is not an object of consciousness, like a sky-flower! All which shows that to maintain as a general principle that something which is an object of consciousness cannot itself be consciousness is simply ridiculous.'
Consciousness is not eternal. It was further maintained by the purvapakshin that as consciousness is self-established it has no antecedent nonexistence and so on, and that this disproves its having an origin. But this is an attempt to prove something not proved by something else that is equally unproved; comparable to a man blind from birth undertaking to guide another blind man! You have no right to maintain the non-existence of the antecedent non-existence of conscious. ness on the ground that there is nothing to make us apprehend that non-existence; for there is something to make us apprehend it, viz. consciousness itself !-But how can consciousness at the time when it is, make us apprehend its own previous non-existence which is contradictorily opposed to it ?—Consciousness, we rejoin, does not necessarily constitute as its objects only what occupies the same time with itself; were it so it would follow that neither the past nor the future can be the object of consciousness. Or do you mean that there is an absolute rule that the
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