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


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Page 1268
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VEDANTA-SUTRAS.
self-luminous. There are many scriptural texts declaring this, compare e. g. 'As a mass of salt has neither inside nor outside but is altogether a mass of taste, thus indeed that Self has neither inside nor outside but is altogether a mass of knowledge' (Bri. Up. IV, 6, 12); 'There that person becomes self-luminous, there is no destruction of the knowing of the knower' (Bri. Up. IV, 3, 14; 30); 'He who knows, let me smell this, he is the Self' (Kh. Up. VIII, 12, 4); 'Who is that Self? That one who is made of knowledge, among the prânas, within the heart, the light, the person' (Bri. Up. IV, 3, 7); 'For it is he who sees, hears, smells, tastes, thinks, considers, acts, the person whose Self is knowledge' (Pr. Up. IV, 9); 'Whereby should one know the knower' (Bri. Up. IV, 5, 15). This person knows,'' The seer does not see death nor illness nor pain' (Kh. Up. VIII, 26, 2); 'That highest person not remembering this body into which he was born' (Kh. Up. VIII, 12, 3); Thus these sixteen parts of the spectator that go towards the person; when they have reached the person, sink into him' (Pr. Up. VI, 5); 'From this consisting of mind, there is different an interior Self consisting of knowledge (Taitt. Up. II, 4). And the Sûtrakâra also will refer to the Self as a 'knower' in II, 3, 18. All which shows that the self-luminous Self is a knower, i. e. a knowing subject, and not pure light (non-personal intelligence). In general we may say that where there is light it must belong to something, as shown by the light of a lamp. The Self thus cannot be mere consciousness. The grammarians moreover tell us that words such as 'consciousness,'' knowledge,' &c., are relative; neither ordinary nor Vedic language uses expressions such as 'he knows' without reference to an object known and an agent who knows.
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With reference to the assertion that consciousness constitutes the Self, because it (consciousness) is not nonintelligent (gada), we ask what you understand by this 'absence of non-intelligence.' If you reply 'luminousness due to the being of the thing itself (i. e. of the thing which is agada)'; we point out that this definition would wrongly include lamps also, and similar things; and it would more
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