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ANUGITA
CHAPTER XXVII
Page1
Brahman said :
From egoism, verily, were the five great elements born--earth, air, space, water, and light as the fifth. In these five great elements, in the operations of (perceiving) sound, touch, colour, taste, and smell, creatures are deluded 1. When, at the termination of the destruction of the great elements, the final dissolution approaches, O talented one! a great danger for all living beings arises 2. Every entity is dissolved into that from which it is produced. They are born one from the other, and are dissolved in the reverse order 3. Then when every entity, movable or immovable, has been dissolved, the talented men who possess a (good) memory 4 are not dissolved at all. Sound, touch, and likewise colour, taste, and smell as the fifth; the operations (connected with these) have causes 5, and are inconstant, and their name is delusion. Caused by the production of avarice 6, not different from one another 7, and insignificant 8, connected with flesh and blood, and depending upon one another, excluded from the self 9, these are helpless and powerless. The Prana and the Apana, the Udana, the Samana, and the Vyana also, these five winds are also joined to the inner self 10, and together with speech, mind, and understanding make the eight constituents of the universe 11.
Footnotes :
1. The contact of the objects of sense with the senses is the source of delusion.
2. Cf. Gita, and note 1 there.
3. Cf. Sankhya-sutra I, 121, and infra.
4. I.e. knowledge of the truth, Arguna Misra.
5. Hence, as they have a beginning, they also must have an end and hence they are inconstant.
6. This and following epithets expand the idea of inconstancy.
7. Being all in substance connected with the Prakriti, the material world, so to say.
8. Containing no reality, Nilakantha.
9. Nilakantha apparently takes the original here to mean of gross nature, not, subtle, such as anything connected with the self would be. They are helpless and powerless without support from other principles, and mainly the self.
10. He here states what is more closely connected with the self, and, as Nilakantha puts it, accompanies the self till final emancipation. The inner self Nilakantha takes to mean the self associated with egoism or self-consciousness.
11. Nilakantha cites certain texts to show that the perceptive senses work only through the mind, and that the objects of the senses are produced from the senses, and hence the universe, he says, is constituted of the eight enumerated above.
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