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


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Page 1368
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160
VEDANTA-SUTRAS.
of change, and the souls implicated in matter; for as both of these enter into different states of existence called by different names, they do not enjoy unconditioned being. The term 'knowledge' expresses the characteristic of permanently non-contracted intelligence, and thus distinguishes Brahman from the released souls whose intelligence is sometimes in a contracted state. And the term 'Infinite' denotes that, whose nature is free from all limitation of place, time, and particular substantial nature; and as Brahman's essential nature possesses attributes, infinity belongs both to the essential nature and to the attributes. The qualification of Infinity excludes all those individual souls whose essential nature and attributes are not unsurpassable, and who are distinct from the two classes of beings already excluded by the two former terms (viz. 'true being' and 'knowledge').-The entire text therefore defines Brahman-which is already known to be the cause of the origination, &c., of the world-as that which is in kind different from all other things; and it is therefore not true that the two texts under discussion have no force because mutually depending on each other. And from this it follows that a knowledge of Brahman may be gained on the ground of its characteristic marks-such as its being the cause of the origination, &c., of the world, free from all evil, omniscient, all-powerful, and so on.
To those, on the other hand, who maintain that the object of enquiry is a substance devoid of all difference, neither the first nor the second Sûtra can be acceptable; for the Brahman, the enquiry into which the first Sûtra proposes, is, according to authoritative etymology, something of supreme greatness; and according to the second Sutra it is the cause of the origin, subsistence, and final destruction of the world. The same remark holds good with regard to all following Sutras, and the scriptural texts on which they are based-none of them confirm the theory of a substance devoid of all difference. Nor, again, does Reasoning prove such a theory; for Reasoning has for its object things possessing a 'proving' attribute which constantly goes together with an attribute 'to be proved.'
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