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


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Page 1644
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436
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
• The one god hidden within all beings' (Svet. Up. VI, 11); • The one god entered in many places'; 'That Self hidden in all beings does not shine forth'(Ka. Up. I, 3, 12); There is no other seer but he' (Bri. Up. III, 3, 23); and others.But if you maintain that the one Brahman constitutes the soul in all living bodies, it follows that any particular pain or pleasure should affect the consciousness of all embodied beings, just as an agreeable sensation affecting the foot gives rise to a feeling of pleasure in the head ; and that there would be no distinction of individual soul and Lord, released souls and souls in bondage, pupils and teachers, men wise and ignorant, and so on.
Now, in reply to this, some of those who hold the non-duality of Brahman give the following explanation. The many individual souls are the reflections of the one Brahman, and their states of pain, pleasure, and so on, remain distinct owing to the different limiting adjuncts (on which the existence of each individual soul as such depends), in the same way as the many reflected images of one and the same face in mirrors, crystals, sword-blades, &c., remain distinct owing to their limiting adjuncts (viz. mirrors, &c.); one image being small, another large, one being bright, another dim, and so on.—But you have said that scriptural texts such as Having entered with this living Self' show that the souls are not different from Brahman!—They are indeed not different in reality, but we maintain their distinction on the basis of an imagined difference.-To whom then does that imagination belong? Not to Brahman surely whose nature, consisting of pure intelligence, allows no room for imagination of any kind ! Nor also to the individual souls; for this would imply a faulty mutual dependence, the existence of the soul depending on imagination and that imagination residing in the soul !—Not so, the advaita-vådin replies. Nescience (wrong imagination) and the existence of the souls form an endless retrogressive chain; their relation is like that of the seed and the sprout. Moreover, mutual dependence and the like, which are held to constitute defects in the case of real things, are unable to disestablish Nescience,
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