| In the second
aspect of Vedanta, that is the nature of emancipation and what happens to emancipated
souls, there are differences between the schools. One school posits the individual
soul’s perfect absorption into Brahman-or to be exact, realization that it is
Brahman; it had been Brahman all along but did not know it. Another school holds it joins Iswara without losing its own individuality, while
a third lays down that it remains eternally distinct from Brahman and from every other
individual soul, and enjoys eternal beatitude in the highest heaven to the full
measure of its own capacity. All the great teachers who taught the doctrine of maaya
lived their lives on the basis that this world is a reality.
Leaving aside the weak and the hypocritical who teach one
thing and practise another, if we reflect on the actual lives of the great and good
Vedantins who lived in the light of the truth that they saw, it will be evident that they
took this world and this life and the law of karma to be hard realities. If still they
taught the doctrine of maaya, that every thing is an illusion created by the Lord, what
can that teaching mean? It canonly mean that the apparent with its false values is
different from the real. |
