English
Instead of labouring the point further, it is accordingly con¬ cluded that the transforming or evolvent material cause of this entire manifold is Maya and not Brah¬ man. ’ ’ > Thus, on a retrospective review of all these different explanations, it is easy to see that all of them agree, in spite of their well-recognised diver¬ gences, In positing two principles as explanatory of * ftroftOT* twiMwwflwm tfa. totoh Siddh&ntaleia, i. aflwm i to* otto q ftw yi nrt TOt * fii* wrofiiOTin - trowfaro, ot: i I8VAEA AND BEAHMAN 255 the empirical order: Brahman, the principle of Being and Maya, the principle of Becoming. It is neither feasible nor indispensable to consider in historic succession the literature that has come into being by way of reaction against the doctrine of Maya or Avidya current in the Samkara-Vedanta School. Whatever the role in which it appears in the fiamkara-Vedanta School, it seems to have been given a permanent lease of existence in the heritage of reaction that followed in its wake. The first in importance is the charge of a&rayanupapatii ( oimq i fluu fa). *.g. the impossibility of a locus), preferred against avidya by Ramanuja, the prota¬ gonist of the opposition, in his famous enunciation of a ‘ seven-fold ’ inadmissibility of avidya. Granted its existence, what is it that serves, so contends Ramanuja, as its locus in the matter of generating error or falsity? Not surely the Jlva, in as much as the Jiva [itself] is made or formed by avidya. Nor even Brahman, for it, as being of the nature of self-manifest knowledge, is (necessarily) antagonis¬ tic to avidya* Pursuing the tenor of this criticism Ramanuja concludes that mayd and ajMnam are not the same thing. Maya is only a iakti or power of I6vara, inhering in Him, while ajMnam is mere absence of knowledge. AjMnam inheres in Jiva and mystifies him alone. It cannot contaminate, by its contact, Brahman who is the repository of infinite knowledge or omniscience. Similarly, * w (t ftm i fimi awidtft i > *rfror- i *rtfa Jrertfiw; qri m t nrawwftqiffwi - — Snbhdshyam, I. 1. i. 20(5 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA Madhvacaryya, the cliief exponent of the dualistie Vedanta, embarks upon his philosophic career with the avowed purpose of establishing the reality of the sense-world—by way of a refutation of the doctrine of Maya and a collateral justification of the fivefold difference ( ), namely, that between Uvuro and Jlva, between Idvara and the material world, between one Jlva and another, between Jlva and the material world and, finally, that among the parts of the material world. In a monograph entitled the refutation of the mdya doctrine he argues that, on its own showing, the reality of the oneness of the self with Brahman is incomprehensi¬ ble, for, on the omission of a reality in excess of the individuality of self, the [proposed] doctrine of ad- vaita or non-dualism is undermined (sj fa nmro 7TWTT1 \ 0n th e denial of an excess ( ) there is, again, incurred the fallacy of siddhasadhanata (fi nrarePWT ), owing lo the self-manifest character of the self. In two other minor treatises called and he disqualifies the inference of cosmic un¬ reality as being ‘ unproved ’ or asiddha (ufa opifapQT fafa*. Now, it may be asked : “ whether you admit ‘ that Brahman, cast in the moulds of logic, is the world of experience or that it is Isvara ’—which is, after all, a matter of terminology,—is not the strictly unqualified monism of Sarakara held in jeopardy or stultified by the admission of a principle of becoming by the side of Brahman or Being-in-itself, or even ISVARA AND BRAHMAN 257 of something which is non-Being—call it the princi¬ ple of objectify, of self-expression, of prakrti or Maya —nestling in the heart of Being and thus con¬ tradictory to its nature?” All systematic attempts at explanation, whether in the Bast or in the West, have been invariably pulled up before the problem of a first beginning and constrained to employ the same device of catching ‘ nature half-in-and-half-out,’ with individual variations of their own. To begin with the classic prototype of it in the West, we may </ refer to the Platonic vky (matter) or even /to/ op the element of negativity in its relation to eiSos (Idea). Both Maya and vXrj have a functional similarity so far as they afford an explanation of an apparent world of diversity or 1 copies ’ standing over against the sole or exclusive reality of the Absolute or Idea which, as eternally perfect and complete, is thwarted in its activity of self-realisation by this pass¬ ive or negative principle. On closer inspection, how¬ ever, differences stand out against the background of similarity : Maya is essentially a form of energy (ufa:) credited, as we have seen, with the dual func¬ tion of projecting a world-appearance and of veiling the nature of ultimate Reality, and is productive of t/ names and forms while v\-q is inert or passive, everything being the creation of the Idea which alone is the source of all creative potency or energy; further, Satnkara’s Mayd is neither real nor t' unreal but the Platonic vkrj is both real and unreal—real as a principle or agency 33 258 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA of resistance or obstruction and unreal as being opposed or contradictory to the Idea which alone is real. Similarly, Kant introduces an element of contingency by way of ‘ a manifold of sense, traceable to the ‘ things in themselves ’ (Dinge an sich) ultimately, and constitutive of the raw material of experience which the transcendental unity of apperception has to subsume under the categories iu order to convert it into the flesh and blood of experi¬ ence. Experience is, thus, in Kant’s rendering of the case the result of interaction between the tran¬ scendental unity of apperception and the things in themselves, the latter being, at least, transcend- entally, not less real than the former. According o Sainkara, however, the manifold is a determina¬ tion in Caitanya, which is to be ascribed to the process of Adhyasa or illusory superimposition con¬ ditioned by Maya. But Maya, unlike Kant’s Dinge an sich, has not the same transcendental reality as Brahman which is Being (tcj), pure and simple, or real absolutely, while Maya is neither real nor un¬ real but indeterminate as a category. Fichte, again, having made the transcendental unity of apperception the settled point of departure in his metaphysical construction, goes beyond Kant in investing the principle of self-consciousness—the logical ‘ I think ’ which had only a regulative validity for Kant—with constitutive validity as well. Having a firm grip on the central truth of the Kantian analysis of experience, Fichte thinks that he has discovered the secret of Kant’s philosophy—which he had only suggested but left undeveloped—in the conception of Pure Self or Ego, ISVABA AND BRAHMAN 259 the ‘ I am ’ at the back of ' I think ’ or self-con¬ sciousness, and represents it as absolute creative agency—an act and product in one, or the original ‘ deed-act,’ the thathandlung . This Ego or Self thus affirms or posits itself but this it can do only by opposing or distinguishing from itself a non-ego. By thus limiting and negating itself, the absolute Ego ( Ichheit ) brings into being the element of other¬ ness which is the conditio sine qua non of the con¬ crete relation of subject and object or of self-con¬ sciousness. In thus attaining to self-consciousness —by breaking itself, as it were, against some obstacle and by being turned back, so to speak, upon itself—the absolute Ego or transcendental Subject experiences no intrusion of a foreign factor but is determined from within. This notion of self¬ negation, self-limitation or self-determination is what Fichte sought to convey by the term ‘ Anstoss ' which has its remote ancestor in Samkara’s Maya. Summarily speaking, no world is possible without a consciousness which represents it; no conscious¬ ness possible without the reflection (literally, the turning back) of the ego on itself (‘ re ’ = again; flectere = ‘ bend ’ or ‘ turn ’); lastly, no reflection without limitation, without an opposition or non¬ ego—this is the series of consecutive steps whereby Anstoss is deduced. It is interesting to uote, further, that the dual function of self-affirmation and self-negation, of self-expansion and self-limita- tion, of Anstoss, has its counterpart in the double capacity of projection (fatjqnfa:) and veiling ( ) of Mdyd. But there is juqt this ‘200 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OE THE VEDANTA difference that while Eichte construes this double function of the absolute Ego in an ultimate or meta¬ physical reference, gatpkara would interpret this double process of Maya in a restricted or meta¬ phorical sense—acknowledging its empirical reality, reality from the finite point of view, but clearly affirming its transcendental ideality, unreality from the standpoint of the Absolute or Brahman. There is a far more close parallelism between Samkara’s Maya, and Schelling’s ‘ Dark Ground ’ : both import something in the Absolute yet not the Absolute; both originate the element of finitude in the Infinite ; in the one case the Absolute or Brahman becomes livara or Personal God through Maya, in the other the groundless, the neutrum or the Absolute develops through the Dark Ground into the personal God of love or Creator; both make possible gradations of individuality and perfection or a hierarchy or scale of value in one sense BTOWq ff, while in another sense recognising all individuals or jlvas as equally infinite, absolute and perfect.