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


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Page 1405
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I ADHYÂYA, I PÂDA, 4.
197
strength of the texts declaring non-difference we must admit that all difference is based on Nescience only. Hence, Scripture being an authoritative instrument of knowledge in so far only as it has for its end action and the cessation of action, the Vedanta-texts must be allowed to be a valid means of knowledge with regard to Brahman's nature, in so far as they stand in a supplementary relation to the injunctions of meditation.
This view is finally combated by the Mîmâmsaka. Even if, he says, we allow the Vedanta-texts to have a purport in so far as they are supplementary to injunctions of meditation, they cannot be viewed as valid means of knowledge with regard to Brahman. Do the texts referring to Brahman, we ask, occupy the position of valid means of knowledge in so far as they form a syntactic whole with the injunctions of meditation, or as independent sentences ? In the former case the purport of the syntactic whole is simply to enjoin meditation, and it cannot therefore aim at giving instruction about Brahman. If, on the other hand, the texts about Brahman are separate independent sentences, they cannot have the purport of prompting to action and are therefore devoid of instructive power. Nor must it be said that meditation is a kind of continued remembrance, and as such requires to be defined by the object remembered ; and that the demand of the injunction of meditation for something to be remembered is satisfied by texts such as 'All this is that Self,''the True, knowledge, infinite is Brahman,' &c., which set forth the nature and attributes of Brahman and forming a syntactic whole with the injunctions—are a valid means of knowledge with regard to the existence of the matter they convey. For the fact is that the demand on the part of an injunction of meditation for an object to be remembered may be satisfied even by something unreal (not true), as in the case of injunctions such as 'Let him meditate upon mind as Brahman'(Kh.Up.III, 18, 1): the real existence of the obiect of meditation is therefore not demanded. The final conclusion arrived at in this pûrvapaksha is therefore as follows. As the Vedanta-texts do not aim at prompting to action or the cessation of action; as, even on the supposition
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