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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
Vedānta ( S'ara kara )
souls as Ramānuja holds. Samkara explains the plurality of the individual souls by means of the adjuncts like the mind, the intellect, the ahamkāra, etc. He maintains “It is not, we reply, in itself divided; for scripture declares that there is one God hidden in all things (S'veta. Up., VI. 11). It only appears divided owing to its limiting adjuncts, such as the mind and so on, just as ether appears divided by its connexion with jars and the like.. What is meant there, is only the dissolution of the limiting adjuncts of the Self, not the dissolution of the Self itself."'1
The plurality of the individual souls is thus caused by the various limiting adjuncts like mind, intellect, etc., of an individual, and the individual soul ceases to be a separate existence with the disappearance of the limiting adjuncts. It is indivisible. It is part. less and hence, immaterial. The multiplicity of the souls is an illusion; the final unity alone is real.
Sankara critically considers the various possible sizes of the soul and then concludes that the soul cannot have any particular finite size. The soul is, according to him, infinite, all-pervasive and omnipresent. If the soul is of the size of an atom and if it emits knowledge out of it as its quality, the quality (knowledge) will remain restricted only to the space of the atom; it cannot spread outside it; as the quality and the substance remain in the same place. Similarly if the soul were of atomic size, it could not experience the various sensations extending
1 S'amkara (Com.) on Vedanta Sūtras (Tr. Thibaut), 2.3.17, Vol. II, p. 32.
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