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I ADHYAYA, 4 PÂDA, 27.
403
Brahman-essentially antagonistic to all evil, of uniform goodness, differing in nature from all beings other than itself, all-knowing, endowed with the power of immediately realising all its purposes, in eternal possession of all it wishes for, supremely blessed_has for its body the entire universe, with all its sentient and non-sentient beings—the universe being for it a plaything as it were—and constitutes the Self of the Universe. Now, when this world which forms Brahman's body has been gradually reabsorbed into Brahman, each constituent element being refunded into its immediate cause, so that in the end there remains only the highly subtle, elementary matter which Scripture calls Darkness; and when this so-called Darkness itself, by assuming a form so extremely subtle that it hardly deserves to be called something separate from Brahman, of which it constitutes the body, has become one with Brahman; then Brahman invested with this ultra-subtle body forms the resolve May I again possess a world-body constituted by all sentient and non-sentient beings, distinguished by names and forms just as in the previous aeon,' and modifies (parinamayati) itself by gradually evolving the world-body in the inverse order in which reabsorption had taken place.
All Vedanta-texts teach such modification or change on Brahman's part. There is, e.g., the text in the BrihadÅranyaka which declares that the whole world constitutes the body of Brahman and that Brahman is its Self. That text teaches that carth, water, fire, sky, air, heaven, sun, the regions, moon and stars, ether, darkness, light, all beings, breath, speech, eye, ear, mind, skin, knowledge form the body of Brahman which abides within them as their Self and Ruler. Thus in the Kanva-text; the Madhyandina-text reads the Self' instead of knowledge'; and adds the worlds, sacrifices and vedas. The parallel passage in the Subala-Upanishad adds to the beings enumerated as constituting Brahman's body in the BrihadÅranyaka, buddhi, ahamkâra, the mind (kitta), the Unevolved (avyakta), the Imperishable (akshara), and concludes “He who moves within death, of whom death is the body,
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