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


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Page 1384
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176
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
therefore, can have for its purport an accomplished thing, and hence the Vedanta-texts do not convey the knowledge of Brahman as such an accomplished entity.
At this point somebody propounds the following view. The Vedanta-texts are an authoritative means for the cognition of Brahman, because as a matter of fact they also aim at something to be done. What they really mean to teach is that Brahman, which in itself is pure homogeneous knowledge, without a second, not connected with a world, but is, owing to beginningless Nescience, viewed as connected with a world, should be freed from this connexion. And it is through this process of dissolution of the world that Brahman becomes the object of an injunction.—But which texts embody this injunction, according to which Brahman in its pure form is to be realised through the dissolution of this apparent world with its distinction of knowing subjects and objects of knowledge ?—Texts such as the following:
One should not see (i.e. represent to oneself) the seer of seeing, one should not think the thinker of thinking' (Bri. Up. III, 4, 2); for this means that we should realise Brahman in the form of pure Seeing (knowledge), free from the distinction of seeing agents and objects of sight. Brahman is indeed accomplished through itself, but all the same it may constitute an object to be accomplished, viz. in so far as it is being disengaged from the apparent world.
This view (the Mîmâmsaka rejoins) is unfounded. He who maintains that injunction constitutes the meaning of sentences must be able to assign the injunction itself, the qualification of the person to whom the injunction is addressed, the object of the injunction, the means to carry it out, the special mode of the procedure, and the person carrying out the injunction. Among these things the qualification of the person to whom the injunction addresses itself is something not to be enjoined (but existing previously to the injunction), and is of the nature either of cause (nimitta) or a result aimed at (phala). We then have to decide what, in the case under discussion (i.e. the alleged injunction set forth by the antagonist), constitutes the qualification of the person to whom the injunction addresses
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