English
Everything which is earthly turns towards the earth, all things which are liquid flow together, and everything which is of an aerial kind does the same. The soul of man is divine, and turns towards the Divine. Man is an efflux from the divinity ; he has body like an animal, but has also divine soul and intelli- gence. This is the Self hidden within man, the man himself. All the rest is vesture. It is the prime law of nature, as just observed, for everything to love and return to its source. Man’s soul, from its original instinct, verges towards the Self ( God in him ), as its centre, and can have no rest and happiness till it be fixed on its own centre. Brahman. This alone can satisfy the vast capacity of man’s mind, and fill his boundless desires. The desire for happiness exercises universal domi- nion over man. Pleasures are pursued and pains are avoided by him. The former are regarded as the elements of happiness, and the latter as those of misery. He pursues the one as his Summum honum, and shuns the other as Summum malum. It is the Ved5,nta philosophy which enables its true followers to attain to ( ) the supreme good, the ultimate end of aU human endeavour, the magnet whose power of attraction no human being could 159 successfully resist. It is, in fact, what each individual has most at heart, the goal which, consciously or unconsciously, all are struggling to reach. But the thoughtful find that the happiness of the phenomenal world, like the mirage of the desert, is visible but unreal, because it excites the thirst but never quenches it. Discriminative Knowledge- The vivifying, transforming, and elevating influence of the light of the Vedanta philosophy dispels the dark veil, and then the bliss shines effulgent. Men who become perfectly jJure or simj)lified gain union or At-one-ment with the Deity, the Highest Self, the ceirtre, the Essence and first principle of all things. This union is not the gaining of something new, but regaining of what has been lost, and the realization of the ever-present Deity. This is what is called in the Vedanta the essential identity of the Jimtman, the divine in man, with the Parmdtman, the divine in the univei'se and the Beyond. But it should be remembered that the consummation takes place only when ‘ man can cease to become man and becomes God; but man cannot be God and man at the same time.’ One has to pay the highest price for a thing of the highest value. The price is commensurate with the value. For the highest happiness the price is ( ) the greatest renunciation, which has been one of the four orders ( ) in India for the good and learned, the characteristic mark of which is ( f WM f Vi t Rcq ' ) the pre-eminence of knowledge.^ 1. See the Brahma-Sdtras III, 4, 47-50. 160 It is well-known that Buddha gave up his empire as a price for saving the world. He truly says: — “I cast away my world to save my world. What good gift have my brothers, but it came From seareh and strife and loving sacrifice ?” So did Christ sacrifice himself to save the world. By renunciation, by being selfless, we gain all. Carlyle observes: — “So true is it that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing yom' Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero Avill give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then ; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well *did the Wisest of our time write : “It is only with renunciation ( ) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.’’ Sartor Resartus p. 132. ChMndogya Upanishad. declares (III, 14, 1): — According to what man’s thought is so will he become The wise, who thinks and knows the Self as bodiless within the bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as unconnected with or not joined to the three bodies, as one to which merit and demerit with their consequences and three-fold time do not apply, as identical with Brahman and as consisting of bliss, attains ) release. He thinks and knows Brahman and becomes Brahman. (Br. S. I. 1,4). The knowledge of Brahman, which discards Nescience and effects (^) final release terminates in ( ) a perception — intuition — of Brahman. (Br. S. II, 1, 4. ) Whoever wants to know the true nature of Brah- 161 man must first annihilate the appearance of plurali- ty that obstructs true knowledge, just as a man wishing to ascertain the true nature of some jar or similar object placed in a dark room must at first remove the darkness. For the apparent world has Brahman for its true nature, not vice versa ; there- fore, the cognition of Brahman is effected through the previous annihilation (sublation) of the apparent world of names and forms,’ The final release results from ) per- fect knowledge. Perfect Icnowledge has the charac- teristic mark of uniformity, because it depends on accomplished actually existing things ( ) ; for whatever thing is permanently of one and the same nature is acknowledged to be a true and real thing, and knowledge conversant about such is called perfect knowledge.^ The knowledge of the )Self ( STicTn ) is alone of such perfect nature. It is said that philosophy aims at absolute truth, which is truth for all intelligence, and from know- ing which no intellect is necessarily shut out. The absolute truth for all intelligence is unity, the one- ness of all things. Because the diversity of things is addressed to what is peculiar to each order of intellect, their unity can be taken up only by what is common to all oi'ders of intellect. Unity is thus the object of philosophical pursuit, inasmuch as it is the truth for all, the absolutely true. Existence and Thought of the Self ( ) is the unity of the universe. The thought of the Self consisting of Existence-Thought is the highest duty of all sensi- 1. See the BrahmorSdtras. Ill, 2, 21. 2. See the Brahma-SiUras II, 1, 11. 162 ble men. The knowledge of the Self is the noblest source of purification and enlightenment. The Vedanta shows a method or a path of transit to the domain of the absolute truth. Those who ti’avel on it in quest of the truth discover it. The first step is to free ourselves from Nescience, and then lift ourselves above the vain conceit of being one with our body, and advance, rise, to the knowledge of the Self, whose nature is unchangeable, eternal cognition ( ), pure intelligence. This is called ( ) the discriminative knowledge. Before the rise of the discriminative knowledge the nature of the individual soul, which is ( in reality ) pure light, is non-discriminated, as it were, from its limiting adjuncts consisting of body, senses, mind, sense-objects and feelings, and appears as con- sisting of the energies of seeing and so on. Simi- larly — to quote an analogous case from ordinary ex- perience — the true nature of a pure crystal, i. c. its transparency and whiteness, is, before the rise of discriminative knowledge ( on the part of the observer ), non-discriminated as it were, from any limiting adjuncts of red or blue colour; while, as soon as through some means of true cognition, dis- criminating knowledge has arisen, it is said to have now accomplished its tr4ie nature, i. e. transparency and whiteness, although in reality it had already done so before. Thus the discriminative know- ledge, effected by Sruti, on the part of ( ^ ) the individual soul which previously is non- discriminated, as it were, from its limiting adjuncts, is ( according to the scriptural passage under discus- sion) the soul's ( ) rising from the body. 163 and the fruit of that discriminative knowledge is its accomplishment in its true nature, i. e. ( ) the comprehension that its nature is ( ) the pure Self. Thus the non-embodiedness ( ) and the embodiedness ( ) of the Self are due merely to discrimination and non-discrimination.^ The Vedanta points out such useful ideas on the make and nature of man very forcibly, but its main object is to help him in removing the suffering caused by Nescience (erf^^r) and to save him by the means of ( ) the true knowledge of the Self of all, which alone gives the highest happiness. It enjoins upon him, first, to acquire discri- mination or the power of sifting the true and untrue, the eternal and non-eternal, right and wrong, good and evil, and then to go on nourishing and securing good qualities and rooting out bad ones, till he arrives at a state of purity and serenity. This prepares him to understand the truth, which the Vedanta teaches. He learns to retire into himself^ and perceives that he is made of the two constituent parts, viz; — The physical, — mortal, and the intel- lectual or spiritual, — immortal. Through devout meditation, he is led to see plainly the two parts in himself. He has to relinquish his selfness in the physical part, and recognize it in the true Intel- lectual part. He has then to identify himself with the Self in him which is, in a certain sense, a part, as it were, of the Highest Self. He is conducted by certain processes till he reaches a point, when the truth it teaches becomes self-evident and self-proved. Just as the light of the sun is its own evidence of 1. See the Bmhtna-B'&trai, I, 3, 19. 164 light, and at the same time the direct means of our knowledge of form and colour, so the light of the Veddnta knowledge is so self-luminous as to be the evidence of its own truth, Brahman, and a means of showing other things in their own nature by remov- ing the darkness surrrounding them. Truths are Strange.