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II ADHYÂYA, 2 PÂDA, 2.
485
a substantial form, as clay, gold, and other substances are. It is for this reason that they are known as 'gunas.' You have further said that the world's having one cause only must be postulated in order that an ultimate cause may be reached. But as the sattva, ragas, and tamas are not one but three, you yourself do not assume one cause, and hence do not manage to arrive at an ultimate cause. For your Pradhåna consists in the equipoise of the three gunas; there are thus several causes, and you have no more an ultimate cause than others. Nor can you say that this end is accomplished through the three gunas being unlimited. For if the three gunas are all alike unlimited, and therefore omnipresent, there is nowhere a plus or minus of any of them, and as thus no inequality can result, effects cannot originate. In order to explain the origination of results it is therefore necessary to assume limitation of the guras.
Nor is our view confirmed by those cases only in which it is clearly perceived that matter produces effects only when guided by an intelligent principle; other cases also (where the fact is not perceived with equal clearness) are in favour of our view. This the next Satra declares.
2. If it be said—like milk or water ; there also (intelligence guides).
What has been said—the Sååkhya rejoins as to the impossibility of the Pradhana not guided by an intelligent principle constructing this variously constituted world, is unfounded; for the Pradhana may be supposed to act in the same way as milk and water do. Milk, when turning into sour milk, is capable of going by itself through a series of changes : it does not therefore depend on anything else. In the same way we observe that the homogeneous water discharged from the clouds spontaneously proceeds to transform itself into the various saps and juices of different plants, such as palm trees, mango trees, wood-apple trees, lime trees, tamarind trees, and so on. In the same way the Pradhana, of whose essential nature it is to change, may, without being guided by another agent, abide in the interval
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