The Brahma Sutra · Book 2: Non-Contradiction · Pada 2 · Refuting the rival schools

Why refute the other systems at all, when the business of this shastra is the meaning of its own texts, and refuting breeds nothing except hatred and anger? Shankara answers that people of lesser judgment, seeing systems with a weighty look, adopted by great men and promising perfect knowledge, may take them for the work of omniscient sages and put their faith there. And why return to the Samkhya, when 1.1.5 and the fourth pada of the first book dealt with him? There his readings of the Vedanta texts were shown to be false; here his arguments are met on their own ground, with no appeal to the texts. His inference runs like this. Jars and dishes, all of them clay, point to clay in general as their cause; so all effects, outer and inner, which carry the marks of pleasure, pain and dullness, point to pleasure, pain and dullness in general, and those three in their generality are the threefold pradhana. This pradhana, without intelligence, evolves of itself into mahat and the rest to serve the purposes of the soul, its enjoyment and its release. Other marks confirm it, the limitedness of all effects and the like.

2.2.1: what is inferred cannot be the cause, because the arrangement would be impossible. Nowhere is a thing without intelligence seen to produce, unguided, effects fitted to someone’s purpose; houses, palaces, couches and pleasure gardens are made by workmen who have minds. Look at this world, the outer earth and elements fitted to the fruit of deeds, the inner bodies of every class of being with their organs set in order as houses of experience, a thing the cleverest workmen cannot so much as imagine, and ask whether a pradhana could fashion it; stones and clods show no such power. Clay takes form under a potter; so the pradhana, if it changes, is ruled by an intelligent principle, and nothing in that quarrels with any means of knowledge, since scripture teaches an intelligent cause. The “and” of the sutra adds that the Samkhya’s own marks fail. Pleasure and pain are inner states, and sound and the rest are outer things that cause them, so effects are not made of pleasure and pain; the same sound pleases one man and pains another; if limited effects prove a conjunction of causes, the three gunas, which limit one another, need a conjunction behind them too; and the relation of cause and effect is seen in couches and chairs, which intelligence presides over.

2.2.2: and because of activity. The gunas leave their balance and move toward particular effects, and clay and chariots move toward particular effects only when potters and horses act on them; from the seen we judge the unseen. The Samkhya: intelligence alone is never seen to act either. True; what is seen acting is a thing without intelligence joined to intelligence, the chariot with its horses. The Samkhya: activity belongs where it is seen, in the body; the Materialist even makes intelligence a property of the body. Reply: activity does belong to the non-intelligent thing, and it comes from the intelligent one, present when it is present and absent when it is absent, as burning belongs to wood and comes from fire. Can a self that is pure intelligence move anything? A magnet moves iron without moving; colors move the eye; so the Lord, all-pervading and all-knowing, moves the world while unmoving, and if oneness is said to leave no room for a mover, the answer was given before, that the Lord is connected with maya, name and form, by a fiction of nescience.

2.2.3: like milk and water, says the Samkhya; milk flows of itself for the calf, water for the good of men. There too intelligence directs, “he who dwells in water, who rules water from within” (Brihadaranyaka 3.7.4), “at the command of that imperishable some rivers flow east” (3.8.9); the cow who loves her calf wills the milk down and the calf draws it; water runs by the slope of the ground. The milk of 2.1.24 showed only that an effect needs no outside instrument, and that leaves dependence on the Lord untouched. 2.2.4: and because there is nothing beyond it, the pradhana stands in no relation, and so there is no reason why it should sometimes turn into mahat and sometimes stay as it is; the purusha is indifferent and neither drives nor restrains. The Lord’s acting and resting raise no such difficulty, since he is omniscient and omnipotent and joined to maya. 2.2.5: like grass turning into milk? No, because milk is found nowhere else: grass becomes milk only in a cow, never left on the ground or eaten by a bull, and men who want more milk feed the cow more. 2.2.6: grant the self-activity and there is still no purpose.

If the pradhana regards no helper it regards no purpose either, and the doctrine that it works for the soul collapses. Does it work for the soul’s enjoyment? Nothing can be added to a purusha, and enjoyment leaves no room for release. For release? The purusha is free already, and no reason remains for sound to be heard. For both? The objects are endless, so release never comes. Desire belongs neither to a pradhana nor to a pure purusha; and if sight and creative power must not lie idle, they never cease, and the world never ends. 2.2.7: the lame man on the blind man’s back, the magnet and the iron? That gives up the system, in which the pradhana moves itself and the purusha has no power to move anything. The lame man speaks and points; the indifferent purusha does nothing. The magnet’s nearness is arranged and intermittent; the purusha’s is permanent, so the motion would be permanent too. With a pradhana that has no intelligence, a purusha that is indifferent and no third thing to join them, there is no connection, and a connection by mere capacity would be permanent and make release impossible. The highest Self, inactive in its own nature and a mover through maya, is in a better position.

2.2.8: and because the relation of principal and subordinate is impossible. In balance the three gunas are independent; to become unequal they must give up their independence, and nothing outside them stirs them. 2.2.9: the Samkhya infers otherwise: let the gunas be unsteady by nature, able to fall out of balance of themselves. Then the objections from design return, since the pradhana still has no intelligence; infer an intelligent cause from the design and you have become a Vedantin; and gunas that can become unequal without a cause either never do, having no cause, or never stop, the absence of a cause being permanent. 2.2.10: and because it contradicts itself, the system is incoherent: seven senses in one place, eleven in another; the subtle elements from mahat here, from the ego there; three inner organs or one; and it contradicts shruti, which makes the Lord the cause, and the smriti that follows shruti. The Samkhya has a counter-charge, and Shankara lets him make it: if one Self is both what burns and what is burned, suffering can never end, as a lamp never loses its heat and light, and your sea never loses its waves; the one who desires and the thing desired are two, since a man does not desire what he already is.

Reply: one thing does not stand to itself as subject and object; fire, with its heat and light, neither burns nor lights itself. The body is burned and the sun burns, and that relation holds in the apparent world without touching the one Brahman. The Samkhya himself cannot say who suffers: a purusha without a body is never seen to suffer, a real connection with the body would stain it, and suffering cannot suffer; when he says the purusha suffers “as it were,” the phrase concedes that it does not suffer, as an amphisbaena gains no venom by being “like a serpent”; make the suffering real and release is impossible, since tamas, on which non-discrimination rests, is eternal and its rising and sinking follow no rule. For the Vedantin the impossibility of release cannot occur even in a dream, since the Self is one, one thing cannot be its own object, and the plurality of effects has its origin in speech.

Before the atoms themselves are examined, the sutra answers an objection the Vaisheshika brings against Brahman. His case: the qualities of a cause produce qualities of the same kind in its effect; white threads make white cloth and never cloth of another color; so if the intelligent Brahman were the cause of the world, intelligence would appear in the world, and it does not. 2.2.11: or as the great and the long come from the short and the spherical. Hear the Vaisheshika’s own account of creation. Atoms are spherical (parimandala) and carry color and the rest by kind; two atoms make a dyad, which is minute and short; dyads make a triad, which is great and long. Whiteness passes from the atoms to the dyad, and sphericity does not; the dyad’s minuteness and shortness do not pass to the triad. So by his own rule a quality of the cause does not always appear in the effect, and the non-intelligent world may come from the intelligent Brahman without breach of anything he holds. He tries to escape: the dyad is seized by a contrary form of extension, which blocks sphericity, while the world has no quality contrary to intelligence, non-intelligence being a mere absence.

Reply: sphericity’s power to produce exists before any contrary extension arises, since the new substance is admitted to stand for a moment without qualities; the other extensions come from other causes, as Kanada’s own sutras say, “greatness from plurality in the causes, from greatness of the cause and from accumulation” (7.1.9), “the minute is its contrary” (7.1.10), “length and shortness are explained by this” (7.1.17); and all the qualities of a cause inhere in it alike, so no special nearness singles out some to reproduce themselves. Sphericity fails to reproduce itself by its own nature, and the same may be said of intelligence. Besides, from conjunction, which is a quality, arise substances, things of another class altogether, and Kanada himself illustrates a substance by a quality when he argues that the body is not made of five elements because the conjunction of the visible and the invisible is invisible (4.2.2). Why argue it again after 2.1.6? Because there the opponent was the Samkhya; here, opening the case against the Vaisheshika, the argument is drawn from his own books. The decision: the man who derives the long from the round has no standing to say that an unlike world cannot come from Brahman.

Kanada’s doctrine first, in its own order. Wholes such as cloth arise from the parts in which they inhere, the threads, with conjunction co-operating; so whatever has parts arises from parts, and division stops at the atom. This world of mountains and seas has parts, so it has a beginning and an end, and an effect needs a cause; so atoms are the cause of the world, four kinds for the four elements, earth, water, fire and air. At dissolution things are divided down to atoms. When the time of creation comes, motion arises in the atoms of air by the unseen principle (adrishta), joins atom to atom, makes dyads and at last the element air; then fire, water, earth, and bodies with their organs; and the qualities of the atoms produce the qualities of the dyads as the qualities of threads produce those of cloth. 2.2.12: in either case there is no motion, and so no creation and no dissolution. Isolated atoms need motion to come together, as threads do; motion is an effect and needs a cause; a seen cause, effort or impact, is impossible at dissolution, since effort is a quality of the soul that arises only when the soul is joined to a mind that lives in a body. The unseen principle, then: does it inhere in the atom or in the soul? In either case it has no intelligence and cannot act or cause action unguided, as the case against the Samkhya showed, and the soul cannot guide it, since on the Vaisheshika’s own view the soul’s intelligence has not arisen at dissolution.

Inhering in the soul, it has no connection with the atoms; join the soul to the atoms, and since the soul is everywhere the connection is permanent and the motion never stops. No motion, no conjunction; no conjunction, no dyads and nothing built from them. And how do two atoms conjoin, wholly or in part? Wholly, and no bulk is gained, everything stays atom-sized, and conjunction is seen only between things with parts; in part, and the atoms have parts; imagine parts for them, and an imagined conjunction is unreal and cannot be the non-inherent cause of real things. At dissolution likewise no cause of the separating motion can be named, and the unseen principle exists for the souls’ experience, with no concern for dissolution. 2.2.13: and because inherence (samavaya) is admitted, a regress follows by parity. The dyad, wholly different from its two atoms, is joined to them by inherence; inherence, wholly different from both terms, needs another inherence to join it to them, and that another, without end. The Vaisheshika says inherence is known as eternally connected with its terms and needs no further connection. Then conjunction too, being equally a connection, needs none; if conjunction needs one because it is a different thing, so does inherence, which is a different thing too; and the plea that conjunction is a quality while inherence is not misses the ground of the demand, which is difference, since action also inheres in its substrate without being a quality.

2.2.14: and because the existence would be permanent. Atoms are by nature active, or inactive, or both, or neither. Active, and there is no dissolution; inactive, and there is no creation; both, and there is a contradiction; neither, and their action depends on a cause, and with the unseen principle always beside them the action is permanent, or without it the rest is. 2.2.15: and because the atoms have color and the rest, the reverse follows, as is seen. Whatever has color and the like is gross and perishable beside its cause, the cloth beside its threads, the threads beside their filaments; so the atoms have causes beside which they are gross and perishable. Kanada’s reasons for their eternity fail. “What exists without a cause is eternal” (4.1.1) assumes the point; “the word non-eternal implies something eternal” (4.1.4) is satisfied by Brahman, and a word proves nothing until the thing is established some other way; “and nescience” (4.1.5) either makes the dyads eternal too, since they are equally unperceived causes of seen effects, or repeats 4.1.1; and a thing need not perish only by the division of its parts or the destruction of its cause, since a cause may produce by passing from a bare state into a qualified one, and the effect may be undone as ghee loses its hardness in fire. 2.2.16: and because there are difficulties either way. Earth has smell, taste, color and touch; water has three of them; fire has color and touch; air has touch alone.

Do the atoms of each element carry the same number of qualities as the element? Then atoms with more qualities are larger, and are atoms no longer. Do all atoms carry the same number? One quality each, and fire would have no touch and earth no taste; four each, and water would smell and air would be seen. 2.2.17: and because it is accepted by none, it is to be set aside altogether. Manu took the pradhana so far as the effect’s pre-existence in its cause goes; the atoms no authority has taken in any part. Shankara goes on to the system’s inner faults. Its six categories, substance, quality, action, generality, particularity and inherence, are said to differ absolutely, as a man, a horse and a hare do, and quality and the rest are said to depend on substance; things that differ absolutely do not depend on each other, and if they do depend, then substance alone exists under different names, which is the Samkhya’s view and no Vaisheshika’s. Smoke depends on fire, yet it is perceived apart from fire, while a white blanket, a red cow or a blue lotus is known only through its quality, which therefore has its being in the substance. “Inseparable” (ayutasiddha) means inseparable in place, in time or in nature, and none of the three fits: the cloth is in the threads and its whiteness in the cloth, as Kanada’s “substances produce substances and qualities produce qualities” (1.1.10) requires; the two horns of a cow are together in time; and sameness of nature ends the distinction.

The cause exists before the effect and is separable from it; an effect that does not yet exist cannot be connected with anything, and one that exists is joined to its cause by conjunction, as a new thing is joined to space without moving. No connection is perceived apart from its terms; one Devadatta is man, Brahmin, scholar, boy, father, son and grandson by his relations, and one stroke means ten or a hundred by its place, so the names “conjunction” and “inherence” prove no separate entities. Partless atoms, soul and mind cannot conjoin, since conjunction is seen only between things with parts; assume parts for them and anything may be assumed, a compassionate man abolishing samsara and a spiteful one returning the released to birth. A dyad with parts cannot cling to partless atoms as varnish clings to wood. The relation of abode and abider presupposes the separateness it is meant to prove. Atoms that are limited have a front and a back and sides, as many parts as there are directions, six or eight or ten, and so they perish; and everything down to the atom dissolves into the highest cause as ghee and gold melt without any separation of parts, as milk and water become curds and ice without any conjunction of parts. The doctrine stands on weak arguments, contradicts the texts that make the Lord the cause, and has no authority behind it; those who care for their own good leave it alone.

The Vaisheshika destroys by halves, since for him every change of size destroys a substance and makes a new one; the Buddhist, who has everything perish at every moment, comes next. His teaching has three forms, suited to the capacities of its hearers: everything exists (the Sarvastivada of the Vaibhashikas and Sautrantikas), only cognition exists (Vijnanavada), everything is void (Shunyavada). The realists first. Their outer world is the elements and the elemental: earth, water, fire and air built from four kinds of atoms, hard, viscid, hot and mobile, with colors on one side and the sense organs on the other. Their inner world is the five groups (skandhas), form, cognition, feeling, name and dispositions, which together make up what passes for a person. Everything is momentary, and there is no self.

2.2.18: the two aggregates with their two causes cannot be established. The parts have no intelligence, and the kindling of intelligence waits on an aggregate already formed; no enjoying soul and no ruling Lord is admitted to do the gathering; atoms and skandhas active of themselves would never stop; and the store of self-cognitions (alayavijnana) is either lasting, in which case it is the Vedantin’s self under another name, or momentary, in which case it moves nothing. Without aggregates the whole stream of existence stops. 2.2.19: the Buddhist answers with dependent origination, the chain from nescience through dispositions, cognition, name and form, the six fields, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, birth, old age and death, grief and lamentation, which turns like a water wheel; the aggregates must exist, since the chain cannot run without them. Reply: the chain assigns each link’s efficient cause and assigns no cause for the aggregate; nescience and the rest need an aggregate to live in and cannot be the cause of their own house. If aggregates simply follow one another forever, each either produces its own kind, so that no man is ever reborn a god or a beast, or any kind at random, so that a man becomes an elephant in an instant. And with no lasting enjoyer, enjoyment serves itself and release serves itself, and no one is left to want either. 2.2.20: and because the earlier ceases when the later arises, the links cannot even cause one another.

What has ceased causes nothing; a developed cause that still exerts energy lasts into a second moment; a cause whose nature does not continue in the effect is no cause at all, or the potter’s stick would be as much the clay of the pot as the clay is; and origination and cessation are either the thing itself, so that the three words mean one thing, or its first and last states, so that it lasts three moments, or things wholly other than it, so that it is eternal. 2.2.21: say the effect arises with no cause, and you break your own rule of the four conditions, and anything might arise at any time; say the cause lasts until the effect is born, and cause and effect exist together and nothing is momentary. 2.2.22: the two cessations, the deliberate (pratisamkhya) and the natural (apratisamkhya), which with space make up the three unconditioned non-entities, cannot be established, because there is no complete break. A series is never broken, each member causing the next; and no member is annihilated without remainder, since clay is recognized through pot, shards and powder, and a drop that vanishes on hot iron is inferred to continue somewhere. 2.2.23: and there is a fault either way: if nescience ceases through right knowledge and its aids, destruction has a cause after all; if it ceases of itself, the teaching of the path is useless. 2.2.24: and space likewise, since it does not differ from the two. Scripture says “space sprang from the Self”; for those who refuse scripture, sound needs a substrate as smell needs earth; if space were the bare absence of covering, a second bird could not fly while the first flies, and what marks one place as uncovered is a positive space; the Buddhist’s own books say that air rests on space; and nothing unreal can be called eternal, since eternity is predicated of things.

2.2.25: and because of memory. The perceiver cannot be momentary, since what one man saw another does not remember; “I saw that, and now I see this” needs one seer, and no one thinks “I remember what someone else saw”; the Vainashika himself owns every cognition from his birth to his last breath while saying that everything is momentary; similarity needs one mind to hold the two things compared; and the subject never doubts whether it is itself or only like itself. 2.2.26: being does not arise from non-being, because that is not seen. The Buddhist says the sprout comes only when the seed has rotted, curds only when the milk has turned, the pot only when the lump is gone. Reply: non-being is everywhere one and the same, like a hare’s horn, so sprouts would come from hares’ horns and special causes would mean nothing; give non-being kinds and it is being; effects would be tainted with non-being, and they are positive things; gold that stays gold makes ornaments, and in the seed the lasting particles make the sprout while the rotted part makes nothing; and the Buddhist’s own skandhas and atoms are causes that exist. 2.2.27: and then the idle too would gain their ends: rice would grow unsown, pots would shape themselves, cloth would weave itself, and heaven and release would come without effort. Against the realist, then, the count is this: no gatherer for his aggregates, no causation between his moments, no space, no memory and no causes, and the view falls on each.

The idealist Buddhist now says that the outer world was taught for disciples attached to things, and that the true teaching is that cognitions alone exist. His case: the act, the object and the result of knowing are all within the mind; outer things would be atoms, which no cognition can represent, or aggregates, which are neither different nor non-different from their atoms; cognitions take the forms of post, wall and jar, so the forms belong to the cognitions and outer things are an idle hypothesis; cognition and object are always known together, so they are one; waking is like dream, where subject and object both appear with no outer thing; and the variety of ideas comes from impressions (vasanas), seed and plant in a beginningless samsara, since in dreams variety arises from impressions without objects, and never from objects without impressions.

2.2.28: non-existence does not hold, because of perception. In every perception we are conscious of an outer thing, post, wall, cloth or jar, and what consciousness gives exists; the man who, with the thing before his senses, says he perceives no thing is like a man who says while eating that he does not eat. He says he denies only a thing apart from consciousness; the nature of consciousness refutes him, since no one perceives his perception, and all perceive posts and walls as objects. His own words give him away: “it appears like something external,” and no one says Vishnumitra looks like the son of a barren woman; the object appears as external, and the “like” is wishful. Possibility is settled by the means of knowledge, which all grasp outer things, and never by dilemmas about atoms. Sameness of form proves only that the thing is the idea’s means; when we see a pot and then a cloth, consciousness stays while its contents change, as cowness stays while a black cow gives way to a white one, so thing and idea are two, as the jar is one through perception and memory and milk is one through smell and taste. Two momentary ideas cannot grasp each other, which brings down the doctrines of their difference, of impressions, of bondage and release; and if ideas are known, outer things are known. An idea that lights itself as a lamp does is fire burning itself; the witness that knows the idea needs no further knower, since only the idea is known and the witness is self-established; a lamp needs an eye to see it, and an idea needs the witness, which is one and lasting while ideas arise and pass.

2.2.29: and because of difference of nature, waking is not like dream. Dream things are negated on waking, “I wrongly thought I met a great man”; the post is negated in no state. Dream is memory, waking is immediate perception, and everyone knows the difference as a man knows his absent son remembered from his son before him; fire felt as hot is not shown cold by what it shares with water. 2.2.30: the impressions cannot exist, because outer things are not perceived. The variety of impressions comes from the variety of things perceived, and a beginningless series of impressions is a regress with nothing under it; the Vedantin has the right pair of judgments, that perception of things without impressions is admitted, and impressions without perception of things are not; and an impression is a modification, which needs a substrate, and the Buddhist admits none that can be known. 2.2.31: and because of momentariness. The store-consciousness, momentary like the rest, is no abode for impressions; without one principle running through past, present and future, memory and recognition fail; make it lasting and the system is abandoned. Or read the sutra otherwise: everything said against the realist’s momentariness holds against the idealist. The third view, that all is void, needs no separate refutation, since every means of knowledge contradicts it and no new truth has been produced to unseat the world. 2.2.32: and because it fails on every count. Tested from any side, the system gives way like the walls of a well dug in sand; and Buddha, having taught three doctrines that contradict one another, is judged by Shankara either incoherent or willing to see his hearers confused. Those who care for their own good leave the teaching alone.

The Jaina counts seven categories, soul, non-soul, inflow, restraint, destruction, bondage and release, which reduce to the first two; or five “existing bodies,” soul, matter (pudgala), dharma, adharma and space. To everything he applies the sevenfold predication (saptabhangi): somehow it is; somehow it is not; somehow it is and is not; somehow it is indescribable; and the three combinations of these. Unity and eternity go into the same mill. And the soul, he holds, is the size of its body.

2.2.33: not so, because contradictory attributes are impossible in one thing, as a thing is not hot and cold at once. “Either such or not such” is an indefinite cognition, no better a source of knowledge than doubt; the thesis that all things are non-exclusive is itself a thing, and so somehow is and somehow is not; the knower, the means, the object and the knowledge all turn indefinite, and the Tirthankara cannot teach with any authority, since men set about a course only when its result is definite, and a man of indefinite doctrine gets the hearing of a drunkard. Five categories are somehow five and somehow fewer or more; things called indescribable are then described; a heaven and a release that somehow are and somehow are not move no one to act; and the soul and non-soul claimed as settled fall back into indetermination. The Jaina’s atoms are covered by the refutation of atomism already given. 2.2.34: and likewise the self would not be universal. A body-sized soul is limited, and so non-eternal like a jar; a man’s soul reborn in an elephant cannot fill the body, and reborn in an ant cannot fit it; and the same trouble follows one life through infancy, youth and age. The Jaina offers infinite parts that compress and expand.

Either the parts cannot occupy one place, and infinite parts do not fit a finite body, or they can, and the whole soul is the size of one part, which is minute. 2.2.35: nor does a succession of parts remove the contradiction, because of change and the rest. A soul filled and emptied of parts changes, and what changes perishes like skin; the Jaina’s own picture of release, the soul rising like a gourd freed of its clay when the eight kinds of karma fall away, is lost; parts that come and go are no more the self than the body is; the permanent parts cannot be told from the temporary; and the parts come from nowhere and go nowhere, since the soul is immaterial and no store of soul-parts is known. Or, read otherwise, the Jaina pleads a permanent stream of changing size, as a river is one river; an unreal stream is the void, and a real one changes. 2.2.36: and because the final size is permanent, the two others are permanent too, and there is no difference. The Jaina admits that the soul’s size in release is permanent; then its first and middle sizes, being sizes of the same soul, are permanent too, and one soul cannot enter bodies of different sizes; or else the soul is always of one size, minute or infinite, and never body-sized. Shankara’s close: the doctrine of the Arhat is no more reasonable than the doctrine of Buddha.

How do we know that this sutra, which names the Lord without qualification, attacks only a doctrine about him? Because the teacher has proved that the Lord is both the material of the world and its ruler, and he would contradict himself. The target is the view that the Lord is only the ruler and operative cause, standing apart from the matter he rules. It comes in several dresses: the theists of the Samkhya and Yoga, for whom Lord, pradhana and souls are three natures; the Maheshvaras, the Shaiva schools, for whom Pashupati taught five categories, effect, cause, union, ritual and the end of pain, to break the bond (pasha) of the beast (pashu), the beast being the bound soul; and the Vaisheshikas and others, each in their own way. The bond is what binds the soul, and the matter the Lord rules is neither the beast nor the bond.

2.2.37: the Lord, because of inappropriateness. A Lord who assigns high, middle and low stations by his liking has passion and hatred and is one of us; say that he regards merit and demerit, and Lord and works act on each other in a seesaw, and a beginningless chain of the two is blind men leading blind men; the Naiyayika himself says “imperfections are the causes of action” (Nyaya Sutra 1.1.18), so a Lord moved to act is imperfect, even if the motive is pity; and a Lord who is a special kind of soul is, like every soul, inactive. 2.2.38: and because the connection is impossible. A Lord distinct from pradhana and souls must be connected with them to rule them. Conjunction fails, since all three are infinite and partless; inherence fails, since none is the abode of another; another connection inferred from the effect fails, since that the world is the pradhana’s effect is the very point in dispute. The Vedantin has no such trouble, since his connection is identity, and he defines the cause from scripture and owes experience no account, while a man who defines from experience must answer to it; nor can the opponent borrow scripture as the omniscient Lord’s work, since that proves the Lord by scripture and scripture by the Lord.

2.2.39: and because rulership is impossible. The potter moves clay that is seen; the pradhana, without color, is no object of perception, and no Lord can lay a hand on it. 2.2.40: if it is said that he rules it as the soul rules its organs, which also are unseen, no, because of enjoyment and the rest. The soul is known to rule its organs because it feels pleasure and pain through them, and a Lord who ruled the pradhana that way would feel pleasure and pain and be a wandering soul. Or, reading the two sutras another way, kings rule from bodies, a Lord inferred from kings needs a body, no body exists before creation, and a Lord with a body is a sufferer. 2.2.41: and either finiteness or want of omniscience. The Lord either knows the measure of the pradhana, the souls and himself or does not. If he knows it, they are finite in number and measure, and finite things end as jars do; a finite number of souls is released one by one until samsara is over and nothing remains for the Lord to rule; and what ends began, which is the void. If he does not know it, he is not omniscient.

The Vedanta’s difference is the one the first pada settled: Brahman is both the efficient and the material cause, the maker of the world and its stuff, and the connection between them is identity, which needs no third thing to hold it. The Lord of the Nyaya and of the Shaiva schools is one more being standing beside what he rules, and every objection here comes from that standing apart.

The last system agrees with the Vedanta in making the Lord both the maker and the material of the world, so why attack it at all? Because one part of it agrees and another part is open to objection, and that part is attacked. The Bhagavatas hold that the one blessed Vasudeva, whose nature is pure knowledge, alone truly exists, and that he divides himself fourfold into vyuhas: Vasudeva the highest Self, Sankarshana the soul, Pradyumna the mind, Aniruddha the ego, with Vasudeva as the cause and the three others as his effects. The devotee who worships him for a hundred years by going to the temple, gathering the offerings, oblation, recitation and meditation passes beyond affliction and reaches the highest Being. Shankara says first what he does not contest. That Narayana, beyond the unmanifest, the highest Self and the Self of all, reveals himself in many forms is taught by scripture, “he is onefold, he is threefold” (Chandogya 7.26.2); and the unceasing concentration of the mind on him through approach and the rest is enjoined, since shruti and smriti both bid us meditate on the Lord. The objection is to the births. 2.2.42: because origination is impossible. Sankarshana, the soul, cannot be born from Vasudeva, the highest Self; a born soul would be impermanent and carry every fault of produced things, and release, which is reaching the highest Being, would be impossible, since only an effect that enters its cause is absorbed into it. That the soul is not born is proved at 2.3.17. 2.2.43: and an instrument is not seen to come from an agent.

No hatchet is born from Devadatta, and here the mind, the instrument, is born from the soul, the agent, and the ego from the mind; no observation supports it and no text. 2.2.44: or if, because they have knowledge and the rest, the four are taken as Lords, still that is not excluded. The Bhagavata now says that Sankarshana and the rest are no soul and mind at all; they are Lords, each with the ruler’s qualities, knowledge, sovereignty, strength, valor and glory, all of them Vasudevas, faultless, with no substratum in a pradhana. Even so the impossibility of origination stands. Are the four Lords alike in attributes and yet four selves? Then you multiply Lords to no purpose, since one does all the work, and you break your own principle that Vasudeva alone is real. Do the four forms spring from the one highest Being? Then Sankarshana cannot come from Vasudeva, since cause and effect require some superiority in the cause, as the clay exceeds the jar, and the Pancharatra admits no difference of knowledge or power among the four; and the forms cannot be limited to four, since the whole world from Brahma to a blade of grass is the Lord’s manifestation. 2.2.45: and because of contradictions. Knowledge, sovereignty and the rest are called qualities in one place and selves, holy Vasudevas, in another; and the shastra speaks against the Veda, “not finding the highest bliss in the Vedas, Shandilya studied this shastra.” The decision: the worship of Vasudeva stands, and the birth of the soul from him falls. Ramanuja reads 2.2.44 as approval, “there is no contradiction, since they are Brahman,” and makes the whole adhikarana a defense of the Pancharatra; Shankara’s reading, given here, keeps the objection alive even when the vyuhas are Lords.