English
In men the yigonr of their manly age ; Sound in the Mr — earth's fragrant scent am I — life of all living — good men's Piety — Seed of all Being— Brightness in the Flun&— In the wise Wisdom — in the famous Fame. Griffith's Speemem of Old ffindA Poetry. 6—2 84 DEITT IN ALT.. the infinite modifications of the form which he has thrown aronnd him.*' ^^ Perhaps we may consider by and by this answer of yours," said Blancombe; '^but in the mean time if the nnlikeness of earthly objects to the Divine Being does not compel you, as it compelled Madhwa, to discriminate between them, tell me if a certain reverence towards the Supreme Ruler, whom you justly invoke as the Giver of knowledge, does not teach you to shrink from treading, as it were, upon Him, when you confound that Divine Majesty, to which the wisest of mankind can never even allude without a certain sobering awe, with the meanest of things under our feet ? And especially, is it not a matter of trembling that we should make our Master as it were our servant, or our Judge the agent, and therefore a criminal answerable as regards every impure or bestial action into which animals or men may fall?" "Your question," answered Vidydch&ya, "being a double one, will require a double answer. First, then, our doctrine is so far from being an irreverent one in its tendency, that it rather leads us to reverence every living thing upon this very ground, because it contains in it a particle of the Divine breath. That gross abuse of life, and sensual indulgence in horrible eating of even any animal, which some nations do not scruple to practise, is with us an abomination. As one of your own poets says, — All shapes that creep, swim, fly, or run, Are of the same clear substance spun; The elemental heavens are one. Therefore, instead of lowering God, our doctrine ought rather to be represented as raising all things below. But, secondly, with respect to impurity or sin, which guilty persons may commit, this is not, in so far as they know themselves to be partakers of the Divinity, but in so far as they are ignorant of it. Blind in the darkness of ignorance, the individual soul sympathises with body through its association with it, and although it is guided THOUGH CONSCIOUSNESS REPUGNANT. 85 by the uniyersal soul of which it is a part, even as being a branch of that great soul-tree which stands firm in the heavens with &cea in every direction and embracing all, yet that guid- ance, you see clearly, can only make it act according to its own acquired propensities; just as the same fertilising rain causes one plant to bear good fruit, and another to grow up barren ox poisonous/* " Your answer," said Blancombe, " is certainly veiy in- genious ; but yet it seems to betray the existence of something in the world separate from God, as for instance those veiy pro-^ pensities, or whatever it is which produces, or enables the indi- vidual soul to acquire them. Here then possibly we ought to inquire what that something is; or perhaps it may lead us in the same direction if I venture to ask, whether the conscious- ness of every man and all men does not utter an audible protest against all this theory of our imperfect intelligences being iden- tical with the Omniscient, or our weakness, folly, and sinfulness, with the Divine ? Do we not feel and know that we are flesh and blood ; that the animals around us are even lower than our- selves in the scale of creation ; and that the earth we tread is solid matter?" "Why, that we feel something of the kind, need not be denied," answered the A'chdrya, "but that we know it, is quite a different assertion; for, in fact, that very feeling is partly ajndna and partly Mdyd.' Blan. " By ajndna you mean probably ignorance.' ViD. "Certainly." Blan. " But what is Mdydf ViD. " Clearly, Mdyd is illusion.' Blan. " Are we then illuded, when we aflton ourselves to be here present, and to be conversing, as in fact we are?" ViD. "Why, that our souls are here present, I am not obliged to deny ; but that they are only present in virtue of the presence so fSar of the supreme soul, is what I steadfastly main- tain; and again, that we are flesh and blood, as you seemed, prooaoiy ignorance," 86 THE THREE QUAUTIES. perhaps without duly considering it, to say, as if these limbs which may be mutilated in all sorts of ways without destroying ourselves, made up our actual self, is what no pious person could concede. But now, how much of ignorance or mere ajndna there must be in all the conceptions which you have rapidly glanced at, is clear even from the tenor of our conversation ; for the Mdni, in expounding the opinions of the Saugatas, has both made the soul to consist in intelligence, which rather belongs to bodily organs, and also has avowedly rejected all our sacred revelation; and again, Saddnanda, because he thinks natural objects act according to their inherent properties, removes all necessity of an Iswara, or supreme Lord ; and again, to me that which he calls pracriti, or plastic nature, appears to be purely Mdyd: so that somewhere among us there is certainly ignorance; and no one has yet shewn, at all events, why it should not be ignorance, as I contend, for the individual soul to conceive of itself as distinct from the supreme, rather than to think in what- ever way other persons may prefer." " Well," said Blancombe, " I have to thank you for correct- ing me as to the flesh and blood; by which, however, all I intended to say was, that there is an external world patent to our observation and consciousness, which I am not able to iden- tify with the essence of the supreme soul." *^ Neither do 1 wish you to do so," answered Vidydch^a; " but if you wish to avoid ignorance, you must conceive of the external world as MiyA." " Once more, then, will you be good enough to explain to me more distinctly," asked Blancombe, " what you understand by Mty4?" " I will endeavour to do so," answered the Ach^a, "though indeed the subject is a veiy difficult one. But now you are aware that whatever we feel or perceive externally may fell under some one of three descriptive heads, either imder goodness, or passion, or darkness, or possibly under a blending of more than one of them ; for either we rejoice, or at least acquiesce in MAYA — ILLUSION. 87 things around ns, or again we are irritated or roused by them, or again we are stupid and bewildered as regards them. These three, then, are the three Ounas, which make up what I have heard certain Europeans, in attempting to explain our doctrine, have called the limitations of human thought, but by which I seem to myself rather to mean the conditions of sensation, or the circumstances within the range of which all outward sensation or perception must necessarily fall. You may, if you please, call them impressions, or the three catagories of impressions. Most briefly, perhaps, M£y£^ which comprehends the three, may be termed the seeming of things so and so, however they may seem. That objects^ however, seem to us as they are, or even that they are at all in any true sense of being, we have nothing to assure us; for change, fluctuation, misconception or false appearance^ and insubstantiality, seem to be their characteristics. This fol* lows as a consequence, partly from what you have heard in the reasonings of our friends here about the difficulty of reaching any substance underlying the manifold appearances of the outer world, and partly from what I have heard European philo- sophers have argued with more or less subtlety in a similar direction. The existence of a stone or a tree consists, as &i as we know, in certain sensations only which we have of its hardness, or its solidity, or its growth ; but what is underneath, hard, or solid, or growing, no one has ever manifested, so that in fact it may be called Mdyd or appearance. Thus the Mtini almost proved to you that matter is ignorance. If ever, then, the individual soul fancies itself to consist of such appearances, it is as much in error as a man who, seeing a rope coiled up, mis- takes it for a serpent." " But if I understood you aright some time back," Blan- oombe here said, " you objected to the doctrine of the Saugatas or of the Bauddhas generally, that it made the existence of ex- ternal objects uncertain, and you relied upon our perceptions as sufficient proof to us of such existence. How then do these two positions of yours agree together?