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THE VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY
81
on the other hand, is essentially a personal God, the all-powerful and all-wise ruler of a real world permeated and animated by his spirit. There is thus no room for the distinction between a परं निर्गुणं and अपरं Aoi Brahma, between Brahma and S. Shankara's individual soul is Brahma in so far as [it is] limited by the unreal उपाधिs due to माया. The individual soul of Ramanuja, on the other hand, is really individual; it has indeed sprung from Brahma and is never outside Brahma, but nevertheless it enjoys a separate personal existence and will remain a personality for ever. The release from it means according to Shankara the absolute merging of the individual soul in Brahma, due to the dismissal of the erroneous notion that the soul is distinct from Brahma; according to Ramanuja it only means the soul's passing from the troubles of earthly life into a kind of paradise where it will remain for ever in undisturbed personal bliss. As Ramanuja does not distinguish a higher and lower Brahma the distinction of a higher and lower knowledge is likewise not valid for him; the teaching of the Upanishads is not twofold but essentially one, and leads the enlightened devotee to one result only. 6. As Shankara's views are mostly considered to be true, we will follow him in some details as to what he says in his comments on the Vedanta aphorisms. The whole work is divided into four parts, each part containing four chapters. We will deal with them in order.
(a) In the first chapter he deals with certain passages from Upanishads referring to the word Brahma. We will consider only that part wherein the
1. Gandhi does not actually follow Shankara's Commentary
chapterwise-though, of course, almost all the issues
here taken up do occur in this Commentary. I. P. 6
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