| Sri Ramanuja has
said that the human mind as it is constituted cannot conceive the Lord as an abstract
essence. Such a conception is impossible to our intellectual nature and our moral nature
normally revolts against accepting such a dogmatic concept. He einphasises this by saying,
By concrete pictures alone is our otherwise indefinite
consciousness rendered definite; in other words, what is formless is by such
pictures rendered into forms." Constituted as we are the conception of God as
devoid of all qualities and destitute of everything which makes up man's idea of Divine
Being, is extremely difficult if not impossible. The
Upanishads State, "There the eye goes not, speech goes not. Nor mind; we know
not, we understand not, how one would teach it." This is a theory of negation of all
qualities to divinity, and the human mind cannot resign itself to this absolute silence
and negative description. The human mind craves for something definite, something concrete
and limited, and, with ingenuity and talent, it has brought down the Supreme to the region
of the determined. Hindu idols represent this descent of the Supreme in variou
forms. God made man but man in his turn madeGod in his own imagination and set up idols
which bore the forms of the figures conceived in his mind. |
