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


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Page 1302
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94
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
at teaching that the erroneous conception of a manifold world has for its substrate a Brahman consisting of nondifferenced intelligence, there would be room neither for the objection raised in I, 3, 1 ("How can we attribute agency creative and otherwise to Brahman which is without qualities, unlimited, pure, stainless ?') nor for the refutation of that objection, 'Because the powers of all things are the objects of (true) knowledge excluding all (bad) reasoning, therefore there belong to Brahman also such essential powers as the power of creating, preserving, and so on, the world; just as heat essentially belongs to fire l' In that case the objection would rather be made in the following form: 'How can Brahman, which is without qualities, be the agent in the creation, preservation, and so on, of the world ?' and the answer would be, Creation by Brahman is not something real, but something erroneously imagined.'
-The purport of the objection as it stands in the text is as follows: 'We observe that action creative and otherwise belongs to beings endowed with qualities such as goodness, and so on, not perfect, and subject to the influence of karman; how then can agency creative, and so on, be attributed to Brahman which is devoid of qualities, perfect, not under the influence of karman, and incapable of any connexion with action?' And the reply is, .There is nothing unreasonable in holding that Brahman as being of the nature described above, and different in kind from all things perceived, should possess manifold powers; just as fire, which is different in kind from water and all other material substances, possesses the quality of heat and other qualities. The slokas also, which begin with the words • Thou alone art real' (Vi. Pu. I, 4, 38 ff.), do not assert that the whole world is unreal, but only that, as Brahman is the Self of the world, the latter viewed apart from Brahman is not real. This the text proceeds to confirm,
1 The sense in which this sloka has to be taken is 'As in ordinary life we ascribe to certain things (e. g. gems, mantras certain special powers because otherwise the effects they produce could not be accounted for; so to Brahman also,' &c.
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