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VEDÂNTA-SOTRAS.
The contention that the soul of him who knows departs from the body in the same way as other souls do cannot be upheld, since Scripture expressly negatives such departure. For Bri. Up. IV, 4, at first describes the mode of departure on the part of him who does not possess true knowledge (He taking to himself those elements of light descends into the heart' up to ' after him thus departing the Präna departs '); then refers to his assuming another body (he makes to himself another, newer and more beautiful shape'); then concludes the account of him who does not possess true knowledge (having attained the end of these works whatever he does here, he again returns from that world to this world of action. So much for the man who desires'); and thereupon proceeds explicitly to deny the departure from the body of him who possesses true knowledge, ‘But he who does not desire, who is without desire, free from desire, who has obtained his desire, who desires the Self only, of him (tasya) the pränas do not pass forth,-being Brahman only he goes into Brahman.' Similarly a previous section also, viz. the.one containing the questions put by Årtabhåga, directly negatives the view of the soul of him who knows passing out of the body. There the clause he again conquers death 'introduces him who knows as the subject matter, and after that the text continues : Yågñavalkya, he said, when that person dies, do the prânas pass out of him (asmât) or not ?—No, said Yågñavalkya, they are gathered up in him (atraiva), he swells, inflated the dead lies' (Bri. Up. III, 2, 10-11). From these texts it follows that he who knows attains to immortality here (without his soul passing out of the body and moving to another place).—This view the Satra rejects.
Not so; from the embodied soul.' What those texts deny is the moving away of the prânas from the embodied individual soul, not from the body. Of him (tasya) the prânas do not pass forth'-here the of him ' refers to the subject under discussion, i.e. the embodied soul which is introduced by the clause ‘he who does not desire, not to the body which the text had not previously mentioned. The sixth case (tasya) here denotes the embodied soul as
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