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


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Page 1648
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440
VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
seen reflected in mirrors, crystals, sword-blades and the like. But here the following point requires consideration. On what occasion do the smallness, dimness and other imperfections due to the limiting adjuncts (i.e. the mirrors, &c.) pass away ?-When the mirrors and other limiting adjuncts themselves pass away !--Does then, we ask, the reflected image which is the substrate of those imperfections persist or not? If you say that it persists, then by analogy the individual soul also must be assumed to persist, and from this it follows that it does not attain Release. And if the reflected image is held to perish together with its imperfections, by analogy the soul also will perish and then Release will be nothing but annihilation. Consider the following point also. The destruction of a nonadvantageous (apurushårtha) defect is of advantage to him who is conscious of that disadvantage. Is it then, we ask, in the given case Brahman-which corresponds to the thing reflected that is conscious of the imperfections due to the limiting adjuncts? or is it the soul which corresponds to the reflected image ? or is it something else? On the two former alternatives it appears that the comparison (between Brahman and the soul on the one hand, and the thing reflected and the reflection on the other-on which comparison your whole theory is founded) does not hold good; for neither the face nor the reflection of the face is conscious of the imperfections due to the adjuncts; for neither of the two is a being capable of consciousness. And, moreover, Brahman's being conscious of imperfections would imply its being the abode of Nescience. And the third alternative, again, is impossible, since there is no other knowing subject but Brahman and the soul.It would, moreover, be necessary to define who is the imaginatively shaping agent (kalpaka) with regard to the soul as formed from Nescience. It cannot be Nescience itself, because Nescience is not an intelligent principle. Nor can it be the soul, because this would imply the defect of what has to be proved being presupposed for the purposes of the proof; and because the existence of the soul is that which is formed by Nescience, just as
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