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


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Page 1311
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I ADHYÂYA, I PÂDA, 1.
103
that this Nescience falls under neither of these two opposite categories.
Now this theory of Nescience is altogether untenable. In the first place we ask, "What is the substrate of this Nescience which gives rise to the great error of plurality of existence?' You cannot reply the individual soul'; for the individual soul itself exists in so far only as it is fictitiously imagined through Nescience. Nor can you say Brahman'; for Brahman is nothing but self-luminous intelligence, and hence contradictory in nature to Nescience, which is avowedly sublated by knowledge.
The highest Brahman has knowledge for its essential nature: if Nescience, which is essentially false and to be terminated by knowledge, invests Brahman, who then will be strong enough to put an end to it?'
What puts an end to Nescience is the knowledge that Brahman is pure knowledge !'-Not so, for that knowledge also is, like Brahman, of the nature of light, and hence has no power to put an end to Nescience.-And if there exists the knowledge that Brahman is knowledge, then Brahman is an object of knowledge, and that, according to your own teaching, implies that Brahman is not of the nature of consciousness.
To explain the second of these slokas.- If you maintain that what sublates Nescience is not that knowledge which constitutes Brahman's essential nature, but rather that knowledge which has for its object the truth of Brahman being of such a nature, we demur ; for as both these kinds of knowledge are of the same nature, viz. the nature of light, which is just that which constitutes Brahman's nature, there is no reason for making a distinction and saying that one knowledge is contradictory of Nescience, and the other is not. Or, to put it otherwise—that essential nature of Brahman which is apprehended through the cognition
and thereby shown to have been the object of erroneous cognition : it thus cannot be being,' i.e. real. Nor can it be altogether unreal, non-being,' because in that case it could not be the object either of mental apprehension or of sublation.
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