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18. Should it be said that from a subsequent passage (it appears that the individual Soul is meant); rather (the soul) in so far as its true nature has become manifest.
The Purvapakshin now maintains that we ascertain from a subsequent declaration made by Pragapati that it is just the individual Soul that possesses freedom from sin and the other qualities enumerated. The whole teaching of Pragapati, he says, refers to the individual Soul only. Indra having heard that Pragapati had spoken about a Self free from sin, old age, &c., the enquiry into which enables the soul to obtain all worlds and desires, approaches Pragapati with the wish to learn the true nature of that Self which should be enquired into. Pragapati thereupon, wishing to test the capacity of his pupil for receiving true instruction, gives him successive information about the embodied soul in the state of waking, dream and dreamless sleep. When he finds that Indra sees no good in instruction of this kind and thus shows himself fit to receive instruction about the true nature of the disembodied Self, he explains to him that the body is a mere abode for a ruling Self; that that bodiless Self is essentially immortal; and that the soul, as long as it is joined to a body due to karman, is compelled to experience pleasure and pain corresponding to its embodied state, while it rises above all this when it has freed itself from the body (VIII, 12, 1).
He then continues: 'Thus that serenity having risen from this body and approached the highest light, appears in its own form'; thus teaching him the true nature, free from a body, of the individual soul. He next informs him that the 'highest light' which the soul reaches is the supreme Person ('That is the supreme Person'), and that the soul having reached that highest light and freed itself from what obscured its own true nature, obtains in the world of Brahman whatever enjoyments it desires, and is no longer connected with a body springing from karman and inseparable from pain and pleasure, or with anything else that causes distress. ('He moves about there laughing,' &c.). He next illustrates the connexion with a body, of the soul in the Samsara state, by means of a comparison: 'Like as a horse attached to a cart,' &c. After that he explains that the eye and the other sense-organs are instruments of knowledge, colour, and so on, the objects of knowledge, and the individual Self the knowing subject; and that hence that Self is different from the body and the sense-organs ('Now where the sight has entered' up to 'the mind is his divine eye'). Next he declares that, after having divested itself of the body and the senses, the Self perceives all the objects of its desire by means of its 'divine eye,' i.e. the power of cognition which constitutes its essential nature ('He by means of the divine eye,' &c.).
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