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THE VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY
75
say that the material cause of the world is Brahma in so far as it is associated with HT4T. In this latter quality Brahma is more properly called at the Lord).
Ath under the guidance of the Lord modifies itself by a progressive evolution into all the individual existences distinguished by special names and forms, of which the world consists: from it there spring in due succession the different material elements and the whole bodily apparatus belonging to sentient beings In all those apparently individual forms of existence the one indivisible Brahma is present, but owing to the particular adjuncts into which he has specialized itself it appears to be broken up-it is broken up, as it were-into a multiplicity of intellectual or sentient principles, the so called gas (individual or personal souls). What is real in each is only the universal Brahma itself, the whole aggregate of individualizing bodily organs and mental functions, which in our ordinary experience separate and distinguish one pia from another, is the offspring of fiel and as such unreal.
The phenomenal world or world of ordinary experience (culaer) thus consists of a number of individual souls engaged in specific cognitions, volitions and so on and of the external material objects with which those cognitions and volitions are concerned. Neither the specific cognitions nor their objects are real in the true sense of the word, for both are altogether due to Atel. But at the same time we have to reject the idealistic doctrine of certain Buddhist schools according to which nothing whatever truly exists but certain trains of cognitional acts or ideas to which no external objects correspond, for external things, although not real in the strict sense of the word, enjoy at any rate as much reality as the specific acts whose objects they are.
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