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386
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
is no more consciousness.' And in the end we have ' whereby should he know the knower'; where we again recognise the knowing subject, i.e. the individual soul, not the Lord. We thus conclude that the whole text is meant to set forth the soul as held by the Sankhyas.--But in the beginning there is a clause, viz. "There is no hope of immortality by wealth,' which shows that the whole section is meant to instruct us as to the means of immortality; how then can it be meant to set forth the individual soul only ?—You state the very reason proving that the text is concerned with the individual soul only! For according to the Sankhya-system immortality is obtained through the cognition of the true nature of the soul viewed as free from all erroneous imputation to itself of the attributes of non-sentient matter; and the text therefore makes it its task to set forth, for the purpose of immortality, the essential nature of the soul free from all connexion with Prakriti, 'the Self should be heard,' and so on. And as the souls dissociated from Prakriti are all of a uniform nature, all souls are known through the knowledge of the soul free from Prakriti, and the text therefore rightly says that through the Self being known everything is known. And as the essential nature of the Self is of one and the same kind, viz. knowledge or intelligence, in all beings from gods down to plants, the text rightly asserts the unity of the Self 'that Self is all this'; and denies all otherness from the Self, on the ground of the characteristic attributes of gods and so on really being of the nature of the Notself, he is abandoned by everything,' &c. The clause,
For where there is duality as it were,' which denies plurality, intimates that the plurality introduced into the homogeneous Self by the different forms-such as of gods, and so on-assumed by Prakriti, is false. And there is also no objection to the teaching that 'the Rig-veda and so on are breathed forth from that great being (i.e. Prakriti); for the origination of the world is caused by the soul in its quality as ruler of Prakriti.-It thus being ascertained that the whole Maitreyi-brahmana is concerned with the soul in the Sankhya sense, we, according to the principle of the
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