The Brahma Sutra · Book 2: Non-Contradiction · Pada 3 · The origin of the five elements and the jiva

The third pada turns inward. The Vedanta texts seem to disagree with one another about creation: some say space arose and some leave it out; some say air arose and some do not; they seem to differ about the soul and the breaths, and about the order in which things came. Since the other systems have just been condemned for contradicting themselves, the suspicion that Vedanta does the same has to be cleared, and space comes first. The objector speaks through five sutras. 2.3.1: space does not arise, because there is no text. The Chandogya’s account of creation, “in the beginning this was being only, one without a second,” goes straight to “it sent forth fire,” then water, then food, and never names space; supersensuous things are known from texts alone. 2.3.2 is the objector raising his own difficulty: yet there is a text, Taittiriya 2.1, “from that Self sprang space,” so the two passages conflict, and they cannot be read as one sentence, since a creator mentioned once cannot be joined to two things, and two things cannot both be created first. 2.3.3 resolves it his way: the Taittiriya word is figurative, because the origin of space is impossible. Kanada’s followers deny it: whatever arises needs inherent causes, substances of its own kind and more than one, and space has none, so it has no non-inherent cause and no operative cause either; no difference in space before and after an origin can even be imagined, since there were never no spaces, large and small; and its all-pervadingness marks it off from the elements that do arise.

The word “space” is used loosely anyway, “make space,” “the space of a jar,” and the Veda itself says “he is to place the wild animals in the spaces.” 2.3.4: and because of the word. “Air and space are immortal” (Brihadaranyaka 2.3.3), and the immortal has no origin; “omnipresent and eternal like space” lends Brahman’s qualities to space; “as this space is infinite, so is the Self to be known”; “Brahman has space for its body, space is its Self,” which could not be said if space had a beginning, as blueness is said of a lotus. 2.3.5: how can one word “sprang” be literal for fire and figurative for space in one passage? As the one word “Brahman” is used of penance and of bliss in Taittiriya 3, figurative for the means and literal for the thing known. And “one without a second”? “One” means without effects, as a man who saw clay, staff and wheel in a potter’s house yesterday and pots today says “yesterday there was only clay”; “without a second” shuts out a second overseer; before creation Brahman and space are mixed like water and milk, both all-pervading and immaterial; and space is known when Brahman and its effects are known, as a few drops of water are taken when the jug of milk is taken. That is the objector’s conclusion, and with it he rests.

2.3.6: Badarayana answers. The promise is not abandoned only if the whole world is non-different from Brahman, as the words of the Veda show. Every Upanishad promises that by knowing one thing everything is known: “that by which we hear what is not heard, perceive what is not perceived, know what is not known” (Chandogya 6.1.3); “when the Self is seen, heard, thought on and known, all this is known” (Brihadaranyaka 4.5.6); “what is that by which, when it is known, all this becomes known” (Mundaka 1.1.3). The promise holds only if everything whatever is an effect of Brahman and non-different from it, as the clay example shows and as the chapter then teaches, “in it all this has its self” (6.8.7). If space were no effect, knowing Brahman would leave it unknown and the Veda’s word would break, which cannot be. The alleged conflict dissolves. The Taittiriya cannot be bent, since it sets fire third, “from the Self space, from space air, from air fire”; the Chandogya can, since its purpose is to tell the origin of fire and it uses no word of order, and one creator may make more than one thing in turn, the second supplied from another text, as “meditate on that as what all begins in, ends in and breathes in” (Chandogya 3.14.1) upsets no order; an order inferred from the sense yields to one stated outright.

Neither option nor addition is allowed, option belonging to actions and addition being taught nowhere, so there is no contradiction. And since the Chandogya’s own promise forces us to count even the unmentioned space among effects, how much more must the Taittiriya’s plain statement be accepted. The milk and water fail: knowing the water by knowing the milk is no perfect knowledge, the Veda is not mixed with error as human speech is, and “one without a second” would be done violence; and the clay example hangs on “Shvetaketu, since you are so conceited,” so the all-knowledge means all things. 2.3.7: but wherever there is an effect there is division, as in ordinary life. Jars and pails, bracelets and earrings, needles and swords are divided and are effects, and nothing undivided is ever an effect; space is perceived as divided from earth and the rest, so space is an effect, and so are direction, time, mind and the atoms. Is the Self then an effect too, being divided from space? No: “space sprang from the Self,” and if the Self were an effect everything would be without a self, which is the void.

The Self cannot be refuted, since it is self-established, the ground on which every means of knowledge works, as fire does not sublate its own heat: “I know the present, I knew the past, I shall know the future”; the objects change and the knower does not, and what is eternal presence does not perish when the body is ashes. The Vaisheshika’s rules fail: effects need not come from causes of one genus, since threads and their conjunction differ in genus, one rope is made of thread and cow hair, and one cloth of plant fiber and wool; they need not come from several causes, since an atom or a mind begins its own motion alone and milk alone becomes curds; it is none of the Lord’s laws that only several causes in conjunction produce. Before and after do differ: the quality by which space is known, sound, did not exist before; and Brahman is “without space” (Brihadaranyaka 3.8.8) as it is “neither coarse nor fine,” so before space there was Brahman without space. Space is non-eternal because it bears a non-eternal quality, sound, as jars do, and the Self bears no such quality. “Immortal” is relative, as the gods are immortal; “like space” marks greatness, as “swift as an arrow” marks speed; and “greater than space,” “there is no image of him” (Shvetashvatara 4.19), “everything else is of evil” (Brihadaranyaka 3.4.2) set space below Brahman. Scripture and reasoning together settle that space is an effect of Brahman, the first in the order the Taittiriya gives.

Context: Taittiriya Upanishad 2.1.1, where the five elements arise from Brahman in order, space first; the Chandogya’s account, which starts from fire, is read in its light.

2.3.8: by this, air is explained. The same positions line up for air, whose abode space is. The objector says air is no product, since the Chandogya’s creation chapter omits it; the Taittiriya’s “from space air” is figurative, for the impossibility shown with space, because “Vayu is the deity that never sets” (Brihadaranyaka 1.5.22), and because texts call it immortal. The decision: air is a product, by the general drift of scripture and because whatever is divided is an effect; the never-setting belongs to the lower knowledge and is relative, Vayu setting less than fire does; and the immortality was answered with space. Why a separate sutra for a case with no new feature? Because the Samvarga vidya glorifies Vayu as an object of worship and scripture says he never sets, and slower minds, led by the words, might take him for eternal.

Having learned that space and air, unlikely as it seemed, have a beginning, someone might suspect that Brahman has one too; and having learned that effects produce further effects, someone might take the Brahman from which space sprang for one more effect. 2.3.9: but there is no origin of that which is, because it is impossible. Brahman, whose self is being, cannot come from mere being, since cause and effect need some superiority in the cause; it cannot come from a particular, since particulars come from the general, jars from clay, and the general never from particulars; and it cannot come from non-being, which has no self to be a cause, “how could being be born of non-being?” (Chandogya 6.2.2). Scripture denies it a parent outright: “he is the cause, the lord of the lords of the organs; of him there is neither progenitor nor lord” (Shvetashvatara 6.9). Space and air could have an origin, and Brahman cannot, so the cases are not parallel; and effects coming from effects do not make the root an effect, since without a root cause the regress has no end, and the root cause that everyone acknowledges is what the Vedantin calls Brahman.

This is the proof that Brahman is self-established and unborn. Everything else has its ground in another thing; Brahman is its own ground, and the series of causes stops in it.

The Chandogya says fire comes from being, the Taittiriya from air, and the objector takes the first: “it sent forth fire” follows at once on “being only”; the promise needs everything to come from Brahman; “tajjalan,” born from it (Chandogya 3.14.1), makes no exception; Mundaka 2.1.3 derives everything from him and Taittiriya 2.6 says “he sent forth all whatever there is”; so “from air fire” means only that fire came after air. 2.3.10: fire comes thence, from air, for so the text says. The ablative “from air” runs parallel to “from the Self” before it and “from earth the herbs” after it, under the same verb, and reading “after air” would need a word the text does not supply. “It sent forth fire” stands untouched, since fire comes from Brahman through intermediate links, as milk, curds and cheese all come from the cow; “that made itself its self” (Taittiriya 2.7) puts Brahman in its effects, and the Gita says “from me alone come the states of beings” (10.4 to 10.5), though they arise from nearer causes. Texts that state creation without an order can be read either way; texts that state the order cannot be turned.

2.3.11: water, from fire, for so the text says, the words carried down from the sutra before. “It sent forth water” (Chandogya 6.2.3) and “from fire water” (Taittiriya 2.1) leave no room for doubt; the sutra stands to give water its place in the order, between fire and earth.

“Water thought, may I be many, may I grow forth; it sent forth food (anna)” (Chandogya 6.2.4). Does “food” mean rice and barley, or cooked food, or earth? The objector takes the ordinary sense, food, and points to the next clause, “therefore whenever it rains, most food is produced,” since rain brings rice and barley and no earth. 2.3.12: earth, because of the subject matter, the color and the other texts. The chapter is about elements, “it sent forth fire, it sent forth water,” and earth’s turn has come; the text gives food a color, “the black color of fire is the color of food,” which fits earth by its prevailing color, though some soils are white and some red, and the Puranas call earth’s color night; and other texts say “from water earth” (Taittiriya 2.1), “what was the froth of the water hardened and became the earth” (Brihadaranyaka 1.2.2), while rice is derived from earth, “from earth herbs, from herbs food.” The rain clause then says that earth, through the earthy nature of the food it bears, comes from water by a middle step.

Do space and the other elements send forth their effects themselves, or does the highest Lord, abiding in them, send forth each after reflection? The objector says the elements act of themselves, since the texts speak of them as agents, “from space air, from air fire,” and give them thought, “fire thought, water thought.” 2.3.13: but it is he, because of the mark of their reflecting. “He who dwells in the earth and within the earth, whom the earth does not know, whose body the earth is, who rules the earth from within” (Brihadaranyaka 3.7.3) shows the elements acting only under an intelligent ruler; “it became being and that” and “it made itself its self” (Taittiriya 2.6 to 2.7) show him to be the self of everything; and the thinking of fire and water is the thinking of the Lord who entered them, since “there is no other seer than he,” and the one who thought “may I be many, may I grow forth” is the subject of the whole chapter. At every stage of the order Brahman is the maker as well as the stuff.

The order of creation is settled; what of the order of dissolution, which scripture makes depend on Brahman no less, “that from which these beings are born, by which they live, into which they enter at death”? The objector says no order is fixed, since no text fixes one, or else the order of creation, which at least is stated. 2.3.14: the order is the reverse, and this is reasonable. A man who climbed a stair comes down it in reverse order; pots go back to clay and snow and hail to water; so earth, which came from water, goes back into water, water into fire, each effect into its own cause, which is subtler, up to Brahman, the subtlest cause of all, since an effect does not leap over its cause to the cause of its cause. Smriti says it, “the earth is dissolved into water, water into fire, fire into air.” The order of creation is stated for creation alone; and it cannot even be wished for here, since a cause cannot dissolve while its effect stands, while the cause may stand when the effect is gone, as clay does.

The objector finds a break in the order. Shruti and smriti know mind and intellect along with the senses, “know the intellect as the charioteer and the mind as the reins; the senses, they say, are the horses” (Katha 1.3.3 to 1.3.4); since everything comes from Brahman, these too must arise and dissolve somewhere in the series; and the Mundaka sets them between the Self and the elements, “from him are born breath, mind and all the organs, space, air, light, water and the earth that supports all” (2.1.3). 2.3.15: not so, because there is no difference. The organs are of the nature of the elements, “mind consists of earth, breath of water, speech of fire” (Chandogya 6.5.4), so they arise and dissolve with their elements and need no place of their own; they are named apart as wandering mendicants are named apart from Brahmins. And even if they were not elemental, a list is no order; the Mundaka enumerates, and elsewhere “Prajapati sent forth mind; mind sent forth speech” runs the organs in a series of their own.

People say “Devadatta is born” and “Devadatta has died,” and the birth rite (jatakarman) is performed over a child, and someone might take the soul to begin at birth and end at death; that is the objector’s case, built from common speech. 2.3.16: but the designation rests on the moving and the unmoving; applied to the soul it is figurative, since its use depends on the body’s being there. The soul has no beginning and no end, because only so can it be joined to the fruit of its deeds as the shastra teaches; if it perished with the body, the injunctions and prohibitions about enjoying pleasant things and avoiding painful ones in another body would mean nothing. Scripture says it plainly, “this body dies when the living soul has left it; the living soul does not die” (Chandogya 6.11.3). Birth and death belong in their first sense to the bodies of moving and unmoving beings, which are produced and perish; of the soul that lives in them the words are used by transfer, since they are used where bodies appear and disappear and nowhere else, and no one has ever seen a soul born or dying apart from a body. “Being born, he takes a body; passing out, he leaves it” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.8) ties the two words to joining and leaving a body. The birth rite concerns the body’s coming to light; the soul comes to light at no time. What is settled here is only that the gross birth and death of the body do not touch the soul; whether the soul is produced from Brahman as space is, is the next question.

There is a self called the living one, the jiva, which rules the body and the senses and bears the fruit of deeds. Is it produced from Brahman like space and the elements, or unproduced like Brahman? The texts seem to pull both ways: some compare it to sparks from a fire, others make the highest Brahman pass unchanged into the state of the soul by entering its effects. The objector says it is produced. Only so does the promise hold, since a soul of another kind would stay unknown when Brahman is known; it cannot be the unmodified highest Self, since that Self is free from sin and the soul is not; it is divided, and the divided was shown to be an effect; “as small sparks come forth from fire, so from this Self come all the breaths, all worlds, all gods, all beings, all selves” (Brihadaranyaka 2.1.20) teaches the creation of the enjoyers after the creation of what they enjoy; “as from a blazing fire sparks of the same nature fly forth by the thousand, so beings come forth from the imperishable and return to it” (Mundaka 2.1.1) speaks of souls, since they alone share the imperishable’s nature, intelligence; what one chapter omits another supplies; and the text of entering means passing into an effect, as “it made itself its self” does. 2.3.17: the Self is not produced, because there is no text, and because of its eternity according to them.

The creation chapters mostly omit it; and its production is impossible, because the texts declare it eternal, unborn, unchanging, the unmodified Brahman itself, having its self in Brahman: “the living Self does not die” (Chandogya 6.11.3); “this great unborn Self, undecaying, undying, immortal, fearless, is Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.25); “the knowing Self is not born, it does not die; the ancient one is unborn, eternal, everlasting” (Katha 1.2.18); “having sent forth that, he entered into it” (Taittiriya 2.6); “let me enter with this living self and evolve names and forms” (Chandogya 6.3.2); “he entered in, to the very tips of the nails” (Brihadaranyaka 1.4.7); “you are that” (Chandogya 6.8.7); “I am Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka 1.4.10); “this Self is Brahman, knowing all” (2.5.19). Divided? In itself it is one, “the one God hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the Self within all” (Shvetashvatara 6.11); it looks divided through its adjuncts, the mind and the rest, as space looks divided by jars; and “that Self is Brahman, made of knowledge, mind, breath, sight and hearing” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.5) means colored by them while its separateness goes unseen, as a coward is called “made of womanishness.” The stray texts of the soul’s production and dissolution speak of the adjuncts: “having risen out of these elements, it perishes after them; after death there is no knowledge” (4.5.13), which Yajnavalkya himself explains when Maitreyi protests, “I say nothing bewildering; that Self is imperishable, of indestructible nature; it enters into contact with the organs.” The promise is kept exactly by Brahman being the soul; the difference of attributes comes from the adjuncts; and Janaka’s “speak on, for the sake of release,” said of the self made of knowledge, shows that self to be the highest. What is decided: the soul neither originates nor perishes; what originates and perishes is its connection with the adjuncts. Ramanuja keeps souls eternal as well and lets them “originate” only in the sense that their knowledge expands.

The schools divide: Kanada’s followers hold the soul to be without intelligence in itself, its intelligence a passing property; the Samkhya holds eternal intelligence to be its very nature. The Vaisheshika’s case: intelligence arises from the soul’s conjunction with the mind, as redness arises in a jar from fire; if it were essential, the soul would be conscious in deep sleep, swoon and possession, and men waking from such states say they knew nothing; intelligence comes and goes, so it is adventitious. 2.3.18: for this very reason it is intelligence. Because the soul is no product and nothing other than the unmodified highest Brahman, which appears as soul through its adjuncts, and because Brahman’s nature is intelligence, “Brahman is knowledge and bliss” (Brihadaranyaka 3.9.28), “truth, knowledge, infinite is Brahman” (Taittiriya 2.1), “without inside or outside, altogether a mass of knowledge” (Brihadaranyaka 4.5.13), eternal intelligence is the soul’s nature as light and heat are fire’s. The chapter on the self made of knowledge says it of the soul directly: “he, not asleep himself, looks down on the sleeping senses” (4.3.11); “that person is self-luminous” (4.3.14); “there is no intermission of the knowing of the knower” (4.3.30); and “he who knows ‘let me smell this’ is the Self” (Chandogya 8.12.4), the senses serving to fix each object, “smell is for perceiving odor.” Deep sleep is answered by the text itself: “when there he does not see, yet he is seeing though he does not see, for there is no intermission of the seeing of the seer; there is then no second thing, nothing other than himself that he could see” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.23). The absence is of objects and never of intelligence, as the light that fills space goes unseen when there is nothing for it to fall on. Shankara’s word jna means consciousness itself, with no knower standing behind it who owns knowledge as a property; Ramanuja reads the word as “knower” (jnatr) and gives the soul knowledge as an attribute, which shares the Vaisheshika’s picture of a knower who owns knowledge.

Of what size is the soul: atomic, middling, or infinite? If it is Brahman, as the last sutras showed, it is infinite and the question seems closed; yet texts speak of its passing out, going and returning, and some call it atomic outright, so the doubt has to be argued through. The objector builds his case across ten sutras. 2.3.19: because of its passing out, going and returning, the soul is atomic. “When he passes out of this body he passes out together with all these” (Kaushitaki 3.3); “all who depart from this world go to the moon” (1.2); “from that world he returns again to this world of action” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.6). Motion is impossible for what pervades everything, so the soul is limited, and since body-size fell with the Jaina, the size must be atomic. 2.3.20: and because the two latter are connected with their own self. Passing out might be figurative, as a headman “goes out” of office when his term is spent; going and returning are acts abiding in the agent itself, and a thing that does not move cannot do them; so the passing out is literal too, and the text even names the exits, “from the eye, or from the skull, or from other parts of the body” (4.4.2), and shows the soul moving inside the body, “taking those elements of light he descends into the heart” (4.4.1), “having assumed light he goes again to his place” (4.3.11).

2.3.21: if it is said that the soul is not atomic because texts say the opposite, “he is that great unborn Self, made of knowledge, surrounded by the breaths” (4.4.22), “like space, omnipresent and eternal,” “truth, knowledge, infinite” (Taittiriya 2.1), no, because the other one is the subject: those texts speak of the highest Self, the subject of every Vedanta text, as “spotless, beyond space” (4.4.20) shows; and where the words “made of knowledge, surrounded by the breaths” seem to name the embodied self, greatness is attributed to it by the intuition of identity, as Vamadeva’s was. 2.3.22: and because of the direct word and the measure. “By thought is to be known that atomic Self into which breath has entered fivefold” (Mundaka 3.1.9), the breath marking the jiva; and the measure is given, “the living soul is to be known as the hundredth part of the hundredth part of the point of a hair” (Shvetashvatara 5.9), “the lower one is seen small like the point of a goad” (5.8). But if the soul sits at one point, how does the whole body feel the cold of the Ganges or the heat of summer? 2.3.23: there is no contradiction, as with sandal paste: a drop touching one spot refreshes the whole body, and the soul, joined to the skin, feels wherever the skin is. 2.3.24: the cases are not alike, since the paste’s one spot is seen and the soul’s is not, and no inference can tell whether the percipient is skin-sized, all-pervading or minute? No, because scripture admits its special abode, in the heart: “the Self is in the heart” (Prashna 3.6), “that Self abides in the heart” (Chandogya 8.3.3), “who is within the heart, surrounded by the breaths, the person of light, made of knowledge” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.7).

2.3.25: or by its quality, as in ordinary life. A lamp or a gem in one corner lights the whole room; the paste has parts that might spread unseen, the atom has none, so the soul pervades by its quality, intelligence. But a quality cannot stray from its substance, as the whiteness of a cloth does not, and lamplight is itself a substance, thin scattered particles of light. 2.3.26: the extension beyond is as with smell. Smell reaches the nose while the flower stays in the hand, though smell is a quality; smell does not ride on particles, since the flower does not grow lighter, atoms are imperceptible while the nagakesara’s scent is strong, and people say they smell the smell; logicians must shape inference to observation, and taste on the tongue does not prove color on the tongue. 2.3.27: and so scripture shows, “up to the hairs, up to the tips of the nails” (Kaushitaki 4.20, Brihadaranyaka 1.4.7), the soul pervading the body by its quality. 2.3.28: and because of the separate statement, “having by knowledge taken possession of the body” (Kaushitaki 3.6), soul and knowledge standing as agent and instrument, and “having through the intelligence of the senses taken all intelligence” (Brihadaranyaka 2.1.17). So far the atom, and it is the whole of the objector’s case. 2.3.29, Badarayana’s “but”: it is so designated because it has the qualities of that, the buddhi, for its essence, as the prajna Self is.

The soul is not atomic, since no text declares its origin; the texts that make Brahman enter the elements and be their self make the soul Brahman itself, of Brahman’s own extent, and Brahman is all-pervading, which is what “that great unborn Self” (4.4.22) says of the soul without any strain. An atomic soul could not feel over the whole body; the skin will not rescue it, since then a thorn in the sole would hurt everywhere, the skin being everywhere, and we feel it in the sole alone; a quality cannot spread beyond its substance, or it is a quality of nothing; lamplight was already shown to be a substance; and smell too exists only in its substance, as Dvaipayana says, “some unthinking men perceive smell in water; know that it is in earth alone and passes over into water and air.” If intelligence pervades the body the soul pervades it, since intelligence is the soul’s own nature as heat is fire’s, with no split of quality and bearer. Body-size was refuted at 2.2.34; the one size left is infinite. Why then does scripture call it atomic? Because desire, aversion, pleasure and pain, the qualities of the buddhi, make up the soul’s essence as long as it wanders; apart from them there is no wandering soul at all, since the soul appears as agent and enjoyer only through the buddhi and the other adjuncts wrongly laid on it; and so the eternally free Self, which neither acts nor enjoys, is spoken of as buddhi-sized.

Shvetashvatara 5.9 says so itself, since after the hair’s point it adds “and yet it is to be infinite”: both cannot be literal, the infinity cannot be figurative, since every Upanishad aims at Brahman as the soul’s Self, so the smallness is the figure; 5.8 ties the smallness to “the quality of mind and the quality of body”; Mundaka 3.1.9’s “small” means hard to know, or names the adjuncts, since that chapter is about Brahman reached by the serene light of knowledge; “having by knowledge taken possession” means through the buddhi, or is a manner of speaking like “the body of a stone statue”; the heart is where the buddhi sits; and the passing out itself hangs on the adjuncts, “by whose passing out shall I pass out, by whose staying shall I stay? He sent forth prana” (Prashna 6.3 to 6.4), and where there is no passing out there is no going and returning. The soul is called small as the prajna Self, the highest Self in the meditations on the qualified Brahman, is called “smaller than a grain of rice or barley” and “made of mind, with prana for its body” (Chandogya 3.14.2 to 3.14.3), the adjuncts lending their measure. Then an objection: if the soul’s wandering comes from the buddhi’s qualities, and buddhi and soul are two things that must one day part, the soul without the buddhi is undefinable and as good as nonexistent, or at least no longer in samsara. 2.3.30: no fault, since the connection lasts as long as the soul does, as scripture shows.

As long as samsara lasts, until perfect knowledge ends it, the connection with the buddhi does not cease, and as long as it lasts the jiva is a jiva; apart from that connection there is no jiva at all, since the Vedanta texts, searched for their object, yield no intelligent substance except the one omniscient Lord whose nature is eternal freedom, “there is no other seer than he, no other hearer, no other knower” (Brihadaranyaka 3.7.23), “you are that,” “I am Brahman.” Scripture shows the connection: “he who is within the heart, made of knowledge, surrounded by the breaths, the person of light, remaining the same, wanders along both worlds, as if thinking, as if moving” (4.3.7). “Made of knowledge” means made of buddhi, as 4.4.5 lists knowledge beside mind and breath, and means having the buddhi’s qualities for one’s essence, as “Devadatta is made of womanishness” means his soft voice prevails; “remaining the same” means not parted from the buddhi even in going to another world; “as if” means the buddhi does the thinking and moving. The connection rests on wrong knowledge, which only perfect knowledge ends, “a man who knows him passes over death; there is no other path to go” (Shvetashvatara 3.8). But in deep sleep and dissolution the soul is “united with being, gone to its own” (Chandogya 6.8.1) and every modification has ceased; how does the connection last? 2.3.31: because the manifestation of what exists is fitting, as with virility. Virility exists potentially in a boy and shows itself at puberty; it does not arise from nothing then, or eunuchs would have it too; so the connection with the buddhi lies latent in deep sleep and in dissolution and shows again at waking and at creation, since nothing springs from nothing, and scripture says the waking is from latent nescience, “merged in being, they do not know that they are merged in being; whatever they are here, lion or wolf or boar, that they become again” (6.9.2 to 6.9.3).

2.3.32: otherwise there would be constant perception or constant non-perception, or else a limit on one of the two. The inner organ, called mind, buddhi, vijnana or chitta by its states, must exist: with soul, senses and objects conjoined, perception would never stop, or if their conjunction did not suffice it would never start, and neither is seen; and the obstacle cannot lie in the Self, which does not change, nor in a sense unobstructed the moment before and the moment after; so there is an organ whose attention and inattention make perception and its absence, “my mind was elsewhere, I did not see; my mind was elsewhere, I did not hear; one sees with the mind and hears with the mind,” and “desire, resolve, doubt, faith and its want, memory and forgetting, shame, reflection, fear, all this is mind” (Brihadaranyaka 1.5.3). So the account given at 2.3.29 stands. What is decided: the soul is infinite, as Brahman is; its smallness, its seat in the heart and its going and coming belong to the buddhi, which stays with it as long as it wanders and leaves it only when knowledge ends the wandering. Ramanuja reads 2.3.19 to 2.3.28 as the siddhanta and holds the soul truly atomic, and Thibaut sides with him; the reading given here is Shankara’s, for whom the atom is the objector’s and 2.3.29 is the answer.

Along with the doctrine that the soul has the buddhi’s qualities for its essence, another attribute is settled: the soul is an agent. The Samkhya denies it; for him the buddhi acts and the purusha only watches. 2.3.33: an agent, because the shastra has a purport. “He is to sacrifice,” “he is to offer into the fire,” “he is to give” teach acts to be done by agents and would mean nothing otherwise; “it is he who sees, hears, perceives, conceives, acts, the person whose self is knowledge” (Prashna 4.9). 2.3.34: and because of the teaching of its wandering, “the immortal one goes wherever he likes” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.12), “he moves about in his own body as he pleases” (2.1.18). 2.3.35: because of its taking, “having taken the senses,” “having taken intelligence through the intelligence of the senses” (2.1.17 to 2.1.18). 2.3.36: because it is designated as agent in actions, and the designation would change otherwise. “Understanding performs the sacrifice, it performs all acts” (Taittiriya 2.5): the word stands in the nominative, the agent’s case, where the buddhi is put in the instrumental, “through the intelligence of the senses”; if the buddhi were meant the text would read “through understanding it performs.” An objection: an independent agent would bring about only what pleases it, and the soul brings about the unpleasant too.

2.3.37: the want of restriction is as with perception. The soul perceives the unpleasant as freely as the pleasant, and the senses only present the objects; in action too the soul depends on place, time and means, and a cook who needs fuel and water is still the cook. 2.3.38: because of the reversal of power. Make the buddhi the agent, and its power as an instrument is replaced by the power of an agent; it becomes the object of “I,” since “I go, I eat” precedes every act; and it needs another instrument, since agents act through instruments; the dispute is then about a name, since whatever is other than the instrument is the agent either way. 2.3.39: and because meditation would be impossible: “the Self is to be seen, heard, thought on, meditated on” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.5), “the Self is to be sought” (Chandogya 8.7.1), “meditate on the Self as Om” (Mundaka 2.2.6) need an agent, the one who will enjoy the fruit of release.

The soul is an agent; is the agency its own nature, or does it come from the adjuncts? The objector says the reasons just given prove it natural, there being none to the contrary. Shankara answers that natural agency would make release impossible: the soul could no more drop it than fire its heat, and while a man acts he cannot reach his highest end, since activity is painful in its nature; avoiding the occasions of action will not do, since they are tied to the power itself; release gained by means would be non-eternal; and scripture teaches release from instruction about the eternally pure, intelligent, free Self, which could not be given if agency were the Self’s nature. So the agency is ascribed to the Self from its adjuncts: “as if thinking, as if moving” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.7); “joined with body, senses and mind, the wise call him the enjoyer” (Katha 1.3.4). To the discerning there is no jiva, agent or enjoyer, apart from the highest Self, “there is no other seer than he”; nor does that drag the highest Self into samsara, since agency and enjoyment are presented by nescience, “where there is duality, as it were, there one sees another” (4.5.15), and the Self weary from waking and dream, like a falcon tired of flying, rests in deep sleep in the embrace of the highest Self, “this is his highest bliss” (4.3.21 to 4.3.32).

2.3.40: and like the carpenter, in both ways, where “and” means “but.” Agency is no more the Self’s nature than heat is fire’s; as a carpenter suffers while he works with axe and chisel and is at ease when he has laid them down and gone home, so the Self is an agent and suffers in waking and dream, joined to the duality nescience presents, and is at ease in deep sleep and in release, having entered its own highest Self. The likeness goes this far: the carpenter is an agent with his tools and no agent with his bare body, and the Self is an agent through mind and the rest and no agent in itself; it stops there, since the Self has no hands to take up and lay down its tools. The injunctions presuppose an agency established somehow and bear on the agency that nescience gives; Prashna 4.9 and the texts of wandering and taking are incidental mentions of the same; even in dream the Self goes with the buddhi, “having become a dream, together with the buddhi he passes beyond this world,” and the dream’s doings are “as it were” (4.3.13); “the warriors fight” and “the king fights by his warriors” say one thing; “understanding performs the sacrifice” is said of the buddhi, as “faith is its head” and “the gods worship understanding as the first-born” show; instruments are agents of their own functions and instruments of perception, and perception is the Self’s lasting nature, no act of an agent. The result: the Self’s agency is due to its adjuncts alone, and in its own nature it does nothing.

Is the agency the soul has under nescience independent of the Lord, or does it depend on him? The objector: independent, since dependence would serve no purpose. The soul has its motives in its own passions and aversions and owns the whole apparatus of action, so what would the Lord add? No one counts the Lord among the oxen needed for plowing. Dependence would make the Lord cruel, for imposing painful activity, and unjust, for its unequal results; the answer of 2.1.34 rests on merit, merit rests on the soul’s agency, and if the agency rests on the Lord the circle closes; or else souls suffer what they never did. 2.3.41: but from the highest, because scripture teaches it. For the soul blinded by nescience and unable to tell itself from its body and instruments, the samsara in which it appears as agent and enjoyer comes about by the permission of the Lord, the highest Self, the overseer of all actions, the witness in all beings, the cause of all intelligence; and release too comes through knowledge born of his grace.

Experience does not show it, and scripture does: “he makes him do a good deed whom he would lead up out of these worlds, and him do a bad deed whom he would lead down” (Kaushitaki 3.8); “he who dwelling within the self pulls the self from within” (Brihadaranyaka 3.7.23). 2.3.42: but with regard to the efforts made, because injunctions and prohibitions would otherwise have no purport, and the rest. The Lord makes the soul act with regard to its own efforts, good or bad, and allots unequal fruit to unequal deeds as a common cause, as rain is the common cause of shrubs, bushes and corn while each springs from its own seed; the Lord makes it act, and it acts; and he had regard to its earlier efforts in an earlier life, back without a beginning, which is no fault. Without that regard, “he who desires heaven is to sacrifice” and “a Brahmin is not to be killed” would mean nothing, the Lord would stand enjoined in their place, he could reward the disobedient, the Veda’s authority would fall, human effort and the fitness of place, time and means would count for nothing, and souls would suffer the unearned; the sutra’s “and the rest” gathers all of these.

Soul and Lord stand to each other as the ruled and the ruler. In ordinary life that relation holds only between things connected, a master and his servant, a fire and its sparks; which is the connection here? The objector leaves it open, or says master and servant, since that alone is known as rule. 2.3.43: a part, because of the declarations of difference, and because some also read otherwise, that Brahman is slaves, fishermen and the like. A part “as it were,” since a partless being has no parts in the literal sense. Why not simply identical? Because difference is declared: “that self is to be searched out, that is to be understood” (Chandogya 8.7.1), “he who knows him becomes a muni” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.22), “he who dwelling within the self pulls the self within” (3.7.23). Why not master and servant? Because non-difference is declared too: a shakha of the Atharva Veda reads in its Brahma-sukta, “Brahman are the fishermen, Brahman the slaves, Brahman these gamblers,” calling the lowest creatures Brahman; “you are woman, you are man, you are the youth and the maiden, you are the old man tottering on his staff” (Shvetashvatara 4.3); “the wise one who made all forms and all names sits calling them by their names” (Taittiriya Aranyaka 3.12.7); “there is no other seer than he.” Undivided intelligence belongs to soul and Lord alike, as heat belongs to the spark and the fire. Difference and non-difference together give “part.”

2.3.44: and because of the mantra, “such is its greatness, and greater than it is the Person; one foot of him are all beings, three feet the immortal in heaven” (Chandogya 3.12.6), “beings” naming all that moves and does not, souls first. 2.3.45: and smriti says so, “an eternal part of me becomes the jiva in the world of life” (Gita 15.7); part and ruler go together on scripture’s word, the Lord with his surpassing adjuncts ruling souls with their poor ones. The objector: then the Lord feels the soul’s pain as the whole Devadatta feels a pain in his hand, and those who reach Brahman reach a larger pain, so samsara is better and knowledge useless. 2.3.46: not so the highest, as with light. The soul, taken up by nescience, holds itself to be the body and thinks “I am pained by the body’s pain”; the Lord does neither. The soul’s own pain is imagined, born of not telling itself from the body and senses that name and form set up, as a man feels his son’s or his friend’s pain by entering him in love and thinking “I am the son.” Call “the son is dead” into a room of men, and the fathers grieve while the renouncers who have dropped the identification do not; so knowledge is of use even to an ordinary man, how much more to him whose nature is pure intelligence and who sees nothing beyond the Self.

The light of sun or moon that fills space seems bent when the finger it falls on is bent; space seems to move when jars are moved; the sun does not tremble when its image trembles in a shaken cup; so the Lord is untouched by the pain of the part called the soul, which nescience presents and the buddhi limits, and when the soul’s separate state is sublated it is Brahman, “you are that.” 2.3.47: and the smritis state it: “the highest Self is said to be eternal, without qualities, no more stained by the fruits of works than a lotus leaf by water; that other self whose essence is action is bound and released, joined again and again with the seventeenfold aggregate”; and shruti, “one of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating” (Mundaka 3.1.1), “the one Self within all things is not stained by the sorrow of the world, being outside it” (Katha 2.2.11). The objector tries once more: if there is one inner Self of all, what room is left for permissions and prohibitions, Vedic or worldly? Do not answer with “part,” he says, since the texts, “having sent forth that, he entered it,” “there is no other seer,” “from death to death goes he who sees diversity,” “you are that,” “I am Brahman,” aim solely at non-difference, the knowledge that releases, while difference is mentioned in passing as something already known; and you have said yourself that Brahman has no parts. Granted; the one highest Self appears as the soul, and the injunctions must be explained from there.

2.3.48: injunctions and prohibitions come from the connection with bodies, as with light and the rest. “He is to approach his wife in season,” “he is not to approach his guru’s wife,” “he is to kill the animal for Agni and Soma,” “he is not to hurt any being,” “a friend is to be served, an enemy shunned” are possible because the one Self is joined to various bodies, and the joining is the error “I am this aggregate,” heard in “I go, I am blind, I am confused,” which only perfect knowledge removes. For the man who has that knowledge no obligation holds, since obligation bears on what is to be sought or shunned and he sees nothing of the kind beyond the Self, and the Self cannot be enjoined upon the Self; yet he does not act as he pleases, since only the error impels action and the error is gone. Light is one, and we shun the fire that burned a corpse; the sun is one, and we shun its light on unholy ground; diamonds are sought and corpses shunned, both earth; the dung of cows is pure and the dung of other beasts is not. 2.3.49: and because of non-extension there is no confusion. One Self, one enjoyer, so one mixing of all fruits? No, since the acting and enjoying self does not extend to all bodies; it follows its adjuncts, and the adjuncts are limited. 2.3.50: and it is a reflection only. The soul is an appearance (abhasa) of the highest Self, as the sun is reflected in water, neither simply the sun nor another thing; when one image trembles another does not, and when one soul is joined to deeds and fruits another is not. The appearance is nescience’s work, and the samsara built on it is nescience’s work too, so that when nescience is removed the soul is known to have been Brahman all along.

Context: Bhagavad Gita 15.7, “mamaivamsho jiva-loke jiva-bhutah sanatanah,” an eternal portion of me becomes the living soul in the world of the living.

Those who hold many selves, all of them all-pervading, are the ones who cannot keep deeds and fruits apart. The Samkhya’s selves are all intelligence, equally near the one pradhana and equally idle, so if one is joined to pleasure and pain all are; the plea that the pradhana works toward each self’s separate release is a wish, and a difference has to be proved, and wishing supplies none. Kanada’s selves are inert like jars, joined to atomic minds, and from the conjunction arise the nine qualities, desire and the rest, which make up samsara; every mind is equally near every self, so the same mixing follows. 2.3.51: because the unseen is no limit. The unseen (adrishta), merit and demerit earned by thought, word and deed, sits in the pradhana for the Samkhya, the same for all souls, and arises for Kanada from a conjunction that is no more one self’s than another’s. 2.3.52: and so with resolutions and the rest: “I wish to gain this,” “I wish to avoid that” arise through the same undifferentiated conjunction and belong to no self in particular. 2.3.53: if it is said, from place, no, because of being within. All selves, equally infinite, are within all bodies; a part of a partless self limited by the body is an assumption, and an assumption limits nothing real; a body that arises in the neighborhood of all selves cannot be assigned to one; if the unseen had fixed places, Yajnadatta would enjoy Devadatta’s pleasure by standing where Devadatta stood, and no one could enjoy heaven, since the merit is earned in a Brahmin’s body here and heaven lies elsewhere. And many all-pervading selves have no parallel anywhere: colors and smells share one place while differing in character, and these selves differ in nothing; space, direction and time are effects for the Vedantin and prove nothing. The one doctrine open to no objection is the unity of the Self. Ramanuja takes the souls as real parts of Brahman and reads abhasa in 2.3.50 as “fallacious argument,” a thrust at the Advaitins.