The Brahma Sutra · Book 2: Non-Contradiction

The first book ended with Brahman as the clay of the world’s pots and the gold of its ornaments, its maker and its material at once, holding it in being as a magician holds his illusion and drawing it back into itself as the earth takes back the four kinds of creatures. The second book hears what smriti and reasoning can say against that result, and the Samkhya speaks first. His case: Kapila’s Tantra was composed by a rishi and is accepted by authorities, and the smritis of Asuri and Panchashikha rest on it; all of them teach that the non-intelligent pradhana is the independent cause of the world. Manu’s smriti is about things to be done, initiation, study, marriage, the duties of the four classes and the four stages of life, and it keeps its scope whatever you decide about the cause of the world. Kapila’s smriti has nothing to do with things to be done; it was composed for the sake of the perfect knowledge that releases. Deny the pradhana and you leave it no scope at all, and a book written by a seer whose knowledge was unobstructed becomes a book about nothing. Shvetashvatara 5.2 even names him, “he who bears in his thought the rishi Kapila when he is born.” Most people cannot read the Upanishads for themselves; they lean on the smritis of famous men, and they will trust Kapila before they trust you. So the Vedanta texts must be bent to agree with him.

2.1.1 answers in the objector’s own coin. If loss of scope condemns a reading, your reading condemns itself, since it leaves no scope for the other smritis: the passage that says of the highest Brahman, “from that sprang the unmanifest, made of the three gunas”; the Purana’s “the ancient Narayana is all this; he produces the creation at its time and consumes it again at the time of reabsorption”; the Gita’s “I am the origin and the dissolution of the whole world” (7.6); Apastamba’s “from him spring all bodies; he is the primary cause, eternal, unchanging.” Smriti in many places makes the Lord both the efficient and the material cause, and since the objector argues from smriti, the sutra answers him from smriti. Where smritis conflict, the one that follows shruti stands and the other is set aside, as the Mimamsa Sutra rules (1.3.3). No one perceives supersensuous things without shruti; the powers of a Kapila come from dharma, and dharma is known only from the Veda’s injunctions, so what is established first cannot be rewritten to suit what was perfected afterward. There are many perfected men and they contradict one another, which leaves shruti as the only court of appeal.

The Shvetashvatara verse names a bare Kapila, and tradition knows another, the one who burned the sons of Sagara; the verse exists to teach the highest Self and proves nothing about a system. Shruti praises Manu outright, “whatever Manu said is medicine” (Taittiriya Samhita 2.2.10.2), and Manu, praising the man who sees the one Self in all beings and all beings in the Self (12.91), condemns Kapila’s many selves without naming him. The Mahabharata raises the question of many persons or one and settles it for one; Isha 7 asks what sorrow can touch the man who has seen the unity. Kapila’s system quarrels with the Veda twice over, on the pradhana and on the plurality of selves. 2.1.2 adds a second reason: the others, mahat and the rest, which that smriti derives from the pradhana, are perceived neither in the Veda nor in experience, any more than the objects of a sixth sense; the texts that seemed to name a mahat were explained under 1.4.1. If the part of the smriti that concerns the effects has no authority, the part that concerns their cause has none either.

Shankara’s weighing of the two kinds of authority is the hinge. The Veda speaks about its matters directly and on its own strength, as sunlight is the direct means of seeing color; a human author’s word rests on something outside itself and reaches us through a chain of teachers. People who cannot judge for themselves are led to the right smriti by having the conflict of smritis shown to them, and the line drawn between those that follow shruti and those that do not. So the decision: where two smritis contradict each other about the cause of the world, the Veda judges between them, and the smriti it contradicts loses its scope on that point without any fault falling on the Vedanta.

Context: this adhikarana follows up the Ikshaty-adhikarana (1.1.5 to 1.1.11), where the pradhana was shown to have no word of scripture behind it. The appeal to smriti closes here; from 2.1.4 the appeal is to reasoning.

Patanjali’s Yoga shastra also makes the pradhana the independent cause and mahat and the rest its effects, and neither the Veda nor experience shows any such thing. Why spend a sutra on it when the previous argument already covers it? Because a fresh doubt attaches to Yoga alone. The Veda enjoins the practice as a means to knowledge: “to be heard, to be thought, to be meditated on” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.5); “holding the body even, with its three upright parts” (Shvetashvatara 2.8); “the firm holding back of the senses, that is called yoga” (Katha 2.3.11); and the Yoga shastra opens, “now yoga, the means to the knowledge of truth.” If one topic of a smriti is authoritative, says the objector, the whole book is, as the smriti about the ashtaka offerings is accepted entire.

2.1.3: by this the Yoga smriti is refuted too. A part being sound does not carry the rest; where the book disagrees with shruti it falls as the Samkhya fell. Shankara says why these two systems are singled out among the many smritis about the soul: they are widely known as offering the means to the highest end, many competent men accept them, and they lean on Shvetashvatara 6.13, “he who has known that cause, to be reached by Samkhya and Yoga, is freed from all fetters.” The reply is that the highest end comes from no knowledge apart from the Veda and from no road of practice: “only the man who knows him passes over death; there is no other path to go” (Shvetashvatara 3.8). Samkhya and Yoga hold to duality and do not see the oneness of the Self, and in 6.13 the two words name Vedic knowledge and meditation, as the neighboring passages show. Whatever in the two systems agrees with the Veda is welcome: the Samkhya’s purusha, free of all qualities, matches “that person is not attached to anything” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.16), and the Yoga’s rule for the wandering mendicant matches the Jabala Upanishad’s “then the renouncer, in discolored dress, shaven, owning nothing.” The same reply serves against every argumentative smriti: they may help the understanding, and the truth itself is known from the Vedanta texts alone, “none who does not know the Veda perceives that great one” (Taittiriya Brahmana 3.12.9.7).

Context: the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and in particular the Ishvara of its first pada, a special purusha untouched by affliction and karma, who presides over prakriti and never produces it. Badarayana’s one sutra touches exactly that joint: a prakriti that makes by itself has already been refused.

The objections from smriti are answered, and the objections from reasoning begin. The objector must first win the right to reason at all, since the Veda has been shown to mean Brahman, and he wins it like this: dharma is known from texts alone, while Brahman is an accomplished thing, and about accomplished things the other means of knowledge have a say, as they do about earth and the elements; reasoning stands nearer to perception than a text handed down by tradition; the knowledge of Brahman ends in direct experience; and the very text that says “to be heard” adds “to be thought.” Then the Samkhya states 2.1.4: Brahman cannot be the material cause of this world, because the world differs from it in nature, and scripture itself says that it does. The world is non-intelligent and impure, made of pleasure, pain and dullness; Brahman is intelligent and pure. Golden ornaments do not come from clay nor earthen pots from gold; like comes from like. The world’s want of intelligence is proven by its subservience: it serves the intelligent soul as an instrument, and two lamps do not serve each other. An intelligent servant serves his master only with his non-intelligent part, his mind and senses.

Someone may answer that the world, coming from an intelligent cause, is itself intelligent, its intelligence unmanifest in wood and clods as it is in a sleeper. Even so the impurity remains, and shruti refuses the help: Taittiriya 2.6, “it became that which is knowledge and that which is without knowledge,” divides the world into the intelligent and the rest. 2.1.5 keeps the objection going against a last appeal. The Veda does make earth and water speak, “the earth spoke, the waters spoke” (Shatapatha Brahmana 6.1.3), fire and water think (Chandogya 6.2.3 to 6.2.4), and the pranas quarrel over which is best. No, says the objector; in such passages the presiding deities are denoted, because of the difference between souls and the matter that serves them, and because of the connection the texts themselves show: the Kaushitaki calls the quarreling pranas “deities” (2.14); “Agni, having become speech, entered the mouth” (Aitareya Aranyaka 2.4.2.4); the pranas go to Prajapati to settle their quarrel as sons go to a father. “Fire thought” is the thought of the highest deity that presides in fire. That is the objector’s whole case: a world unlike Brahman in nature, with scripture’s own word for the unlikeness.

2.1.6 turns the debate: but it is seen. From a man, who is intelligent, come hair and nails, which are not; from cow dung come scorpions. Say the body produces the hair and the dung only the scorpion’s body; even so cause and effect differ, since one lump of matter houses a soul and the other does not, and hair differs from the body it grows on in color and form. Demand full likeness and the relation of cause and effect disappears, since it needs the two to be distinguishable. If the objector points to one mark the pairs share, earthiness, Brahman and the world share one too: existence, found in space and the rest as in Brahman. Press him on what “difference of nature” means. The absence of every characteristic of Brahman? That abolishes causation, which requires something in the effect over and above the cause. The absence of some characteristic? Existence is shared. The absence of intelligence in particular? No instance can be produced against the Vedantin, who holds that everything whatever has Brahman for its material.

And Brahman, having no form, is no object of perception, and having no mark, no object of inference; like dharma it is known from the texts alone: “this doctrine is not reached by argument” (Katha 1.2.9); “who knows it here, who could proclaim whence this creation sprang” (Rig Veda 10.129.6); “neither the hosts of gods nor the great rishis know my origin” (Gita 10.2). The “to be thought” of the Brihadaranyaka enjoins reasoning in the service of the texts, such as this: dream and waking exclude each other, so the Self belongs to neither; in deep sleep the soul leaves the world behind and rests in pure being; a world that springs from Brahman cannot be separate from it. One more turn: if unlike cannot come from unlike, the pradhana, which has no sound or touch, cannot produce a world that has them. 2.1.7: the objector says that on your view the effect, so unlike its cause, must be non-existent before it arises, and you hold that it pre-exists. Answer: that “non-existent” is a bare negation with nothing to negate. The effect exists through the self of its cause before it arises exactly as it does after, since even now the pot does not exist apart from the clay; “whoever looks for anything elsewhere than in the Self is abandoned by everything” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.6). The point is argued out at 2.1.14.

2.1.8 gives the objector his last run. At reabsorption the effect, gross, divided, impure, enters its cause and stains it, so Brahman at dissolution would be impure, and no omniscient Brahman could be the cause. Second, with every distinction dissolved, nothing would remain to make the next creation come out unequal. Third, if the souls dissolved into Brahman and a new world still arose, the released would be born again. Fourth, keep the world distinct even in dissolution and there is no dissolution. 2.1.9: not so, because there are parallel instances. Pots go back into clay and ornaments into gold without lending them their shapes; the four kinds of creatures go back into the earth without making it a creature. If staining were possible it would be as true now as at dissolution, since cause and effect are one at every time: “all this is that Self” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.6), “all this is Brahman” (Chandogya 3.14.1). The answer in both cases is the same: the effect’s qualities are laid on the cause by nescience.

The magician is untouched by his illusion, the dreamer by his dream, the one witness of the three states by the states, and the rope is at no time a snake; “when the soul asleep in beginningless maya awakes, it knows the unborn, sleepless, dreamless non-duality” (Gaudapada 1.16). Deep sleep and swoon answer the second objection: the soul is undivided there, and because wrong knowledge is not yet destroyed, the old distinctions return on waking, “whatever they are here, lion or wolf or boar or worm or gnat, that they become again” (Chandogya 6.9.3); so a seed of distinction, made of wrong knowledge, outlasts dissolution. The released do not return, since in them wrong knowledge has been burned out by knowledge. The fourth alternative no Vedantin holds. 2.1.10: every one of these objections lies against the Samkhya himself. His pradhana, without sound, produces a world with sound; his effects dissolve into non-distinction; his new creation has no cause for its inequalities, so on his view too the released would return. The difficulties are common to both doctrines, and since one of the two must be accepted, the choice falls to the one whose objections have been shown empty.

2.1.11 closes the argument. Reasoning that disregards the texts and rests on private opinion has no sure footing: what clever men labor to establish, cleverer men pull down, and they in turn are refuted, and Kapila and Kanada, both eminent, contradict each other. The objector replies that reasoning can be framed otherwise, on firmer ground. The claim that reasoning is unfounded is itself a piece of reasoning; without reasoning practical life stops, since men act on the assumption that tomorrow resembles today; the sense of conflicting texts is settled by reasoning; Manu names perception, inference and the shastra together (12.105 to 12.106); and the possibility of refuting a bad argument is the beauty of reasoning, since a man is no fool because his elder brother was one. The sutra answers: even so, there would be no release. The cause of the world, on which release depends, is too deep to be even thought of without the texts; it has no form for perception and no mark for inference. Or read avimoksha the other way: release comes from perfect knowledge, and perfect knowledge is uniform because it rests on a thing as it is, as “fire is hot” does; cognitions founded on reasoning are seen to conflict, no one logician can be crowned the best, and the logicians of past, present and future cannot be gathered in one place to agree. The Veda, eternal and the source of knowledge, has firmly established things for its object, and no logician of any age can deny the knowledge that rests on it. Shankara’s settled position: on the ground of scripture, and of reasoning that serves scripture, the intelligent Brahman is the cause and substance of the world.

This is also the sutras’ ruling on the means of knowledge. Shruti decides about Brahman; reasoning works under it and clears the way for it. The Katha’s “not to be reached by argument” is a rule about method, and it leaves room for the reasoning that follows the texts, the kind this adhikarana has been doing from its first sutra.

The pradhana was refuted first because it stands nearest the Vedic system, has somewhat weighty arguments, and was adopted in part by some who follow the Veda. A slower mind might think that another reasoned objection still stands open, the atoms of Kanada: let the Samkhya fall, the Vaisheshika says, and the world may still be built from eternal atoms by a Lord who is only its maker. 2.1.12: by this, the theories that competent men do not accept are explained as well. Manu and Vyasa accepted no part of the atomic doctrine, while they took over parts of the Samkhya, and the arguments that disposed of the pradhana dispose of the atoms unchanged: reasoning cannot fathom the transcendent cause of the world; reasoning on its own has no footing; reasoning framed otherwise still leaves no release; and the atomist, like the Samkhya, sets reasoning against scripture. Having conquered the most dangerous adversary, Shankara says, the sutrakara counts the lesser ones conquered already. The atoms get their own hearing at 2.2.11 to 2.2.17, where the system is taken apart on its own terms; here the decision is only that it has no better claim on reason than the pradhana had.

The next objector reasons from experience. Scripture rules in its own domain, he says, and where another means of knowledge has already settled a matter, scripture is read in a secondary sense, as the arthavada “the sacrificial post is the sun” is read, since eyes settle what a post is. Where does scripture collide with what is settled? Here. The distinction of the enjoyer and the enjoyed is known to everyone: Devadatta eats, and the dish is eaten; souls are intelligent and embodied, and sound and the rest are their objects. If the world is non-different from Brahman, the enjoyer passes over into the enjoyed and the enjoyed into the enjoyer, and a distinction observed now and inferred for the past and the future is wiped out. So Brahman’s causality must be given up. 2.1.13: the distinction may stand, as in ordinary life. Waves, foam and bubbles are nothing other than sea water, and yet they keep apart, now separate, now running together; being one with the sea does not make them pass into each other, and keeping apart does not make them other than the sea. So the enjoyers and the enjoyed do not pass into each other, and neither is other than the highest Brahman. Shankara adds a refinement: the enjoyer is not strictly an effect of Brahman at all. The unmodified creator himself, entering what he has made, “having created it, he entered into it” (Taittiriya 2.6), is what is called the enjoyer, and he appears divided because the effect he enters acts as a limiting adjunct, as one space is divided by the jars that stand in it. What is decided here is decided on the objector’s own ground, with the world of effects granted; the next adhikarana takes the ground away.

The sea and its waves answered the last objection on the footing of ordinary life. 2.1.14 states what is true when that footing is examined: the effect is non-different from the cause, because of the word “origin” and the like. The effect is this manifold world of space and the rest; the cause is the highest Brahman; and the effect has no existence apart from the cause. The word is Chandogya 6.1.4, in the passage that promises that by knowing one thing everything is known: “as by one lump of clay everything made of clay is known, the modification being a name only, with its origin in speech, while the truth is that it is clay.” Jars, dishes and pails are names; as names they are untrue, as clay they are true; and the “and others” of the sutra gathers the texts of the same purport: “in that all this has its self; it is the true; it is the Self; you are that” (6.8.7); “all this is that Self” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.6); “Brahman alone is all this” (Mundaka 2.2.11); “there is in it no diversity” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.25). On any other reading the promise that knowing one thing makes everything known fails. So the world of enjoyers and objects has no being apart from Brahman, as the space in a jar has none apart from space and the water of a mirage none apart from the salt flat. An objector offers a middle way: Brahman is one and manifold at once, like a tree with its branches or the sea with its waves; release attaches to the unity and the whole business of the world and the rites to the manifoldness, and the clay example fits that well. Shankara refuses it.

The example says that the clay alone is true and that the modifications have their origin in speech; the thing illustrated is called “the true,” and “you are that” teaches that the embodied soul is Brahman, a fact that is self-established and needs no doing. Accept that, and the soul’s independent existence goes as the snake goes when the rope is seen; with it goes the independent existence of the world that stood on the soul, and nothing is left for a manifold element in Brahman to explain. “When the Self alone is all this, how should he see another?” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.13); the thief who grasps the heated axe (Chandogya 6.16) shows that the man of false mind is bound and the man of true mind released, which could not be said if both unity and plurality were true; “from death to death goes he who sees diversity here” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.19). On the middle way release could not come from knowledge at all, since no false knowledge would be there for true knowledge to remove. Then the hard objections. If all is one, perception and the other means of knowledge lose their objects; the teacher and the pupil become unreal, and with them the teaching, and with the teaching the unity it taught. Shankara answers that the whole course of the world, with its means of knowledge and its results of action, holds good until the knowledge of Brahman as the Self of all arises, as a dream holds good until the sleeper wakes; the unawakened man takes body, children and wealth for his own self, and secular and Vedic life run on undisturbed. How can untrue texts teach a true Brahman, when no one dies of a rope’s bite or drinks the water of a mirage?

Because real effects do follow unreal causes: a man dies of venom he only imagines; a dream of a woman promises success in a rite, and a dream of a black man with black teeth foretells death; the real sounds of speech are learned from written letters that are not the sounds. And the knowledge born of “you are that” leaves nothing to be desired, since its object is the oneness of the Self; it is seen to end ignorance, and no other knowledge can sublate it. Does scripture, with its clay and its milk, want a Brahman that changes? No: “this great unborn Self, undecaying, undying, immortal, fearless, is Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.25); “that Self is described by no, no” (3.9.26); “it is neither coarse nor fine” (3.8.8). Changing and changeless cannot both be said of the same Brahman, and “unchanging” (kutastha) rules out dividing the two between the time of the world and the time of dissolution, as rest and motion are divided in a body. The texts that speak of change have no fruit of their own; they serve the knowledge of the Brahman that is beyond change, whose fruit is stated, “Janaka, you have reached fearlessness” (4.2.4). Then how is the Lord the cause of the world at all? Listen, says Shankara. Name and form, the seeds of the whole expanse of the world, neither Brahman nor other than it, called in shruti and smriti the maya, the shakti, the prakriti of the omniscient Lord, belong to him as if they were his: “he who is called space is the revealer of names and forms; that within which they are is Brahman” (Chandogya 8.14.1); “let me evolve names and forms” (6.3.2); “he who makes the one seed manifold” (Shvetashvatara 6.12).

The Lord is Lord through these adjuncts, as space is jar-space through jars; the souls he rules are one with him as the space in jars is one with space, and his lordship, omniscience and omnipotence belong to the adjuncts, none of them to the Self cleared of adjuncts by knowledge. “Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, knows nothing else, that is the infinite” (Chandogya 7.24.1); “the Lord takes no one’s sin or merit” (Gita 5.15); and in the same breath, for the world as it appears, “he is the lord of all, the king of all, the protector of all; he is the dam that keeps these worlds apart” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.22). The sutrakara himself speaks of non-difference only for the state of reality, having compared Brahman to the sea in the sutra before while the world of effects still stood; and the picture of Brahman as changing keeps its use in the meditations on the qualified Brahman. 2.1.15 gives a second reason: the effect is observed only when the cause exists. The jar is seen only when the clay is, the cloth only when the threads are; a horse is not seen only when a cow is, and the jar is not seen only when the potter is, so this is no rule about things that are merely other. Smoke, the objector says, is seen only when there is fire. Not so; herdsmen keep smoke in jars after the fire is out, and the real reason is that the mind takes in cause and effect together, which it never does with fire and smoke. Or read the sutra “because of perception”: in the cloth we perceive only threads crossing, in the threads finer threads, down to the three colors of fire, water and earth, and those to air, to space, to Brahman, one without a second.

2.1.16: because the later thing already is. Scripture says of the effect before it arose, “in the beginning this was being only” (Chandogya 6.2.1), “in the beginning this was the Self, one only” (Aitareya Aranyaka 2.4.1.1), setting “this,” the effect, in the same case as the cause; what does not exist in a thing by that thing’s own self is never produced from it, oil never from sand; and what was being then is being now, since being is one. 2.1.17: the objector says scripture calls the effect “non-existent” before it arose, “in the beginning this was the non-existent only” (Chandogya 3.19.1), “the non-existent indeed was this in the beginning” (Taittiriya 2.7). No, because the word there names another state, name and form unevolved, as the complementary sentence shows: “that became existent,” “that made itself its self.” The absolutely non-existent could not be said to “be” at any time, and things are called existent only when name and form have come out, so “non-existent” is used, loosely, for the time before. 2.1.18: from reasoning and from another text. The reasoning first, against the Vaisheshika who holds that the effect is new. Men who want curds take milk and men who want jars take clay; if every effect were equally non-existent in every cause, curds could come from clay. The opponent grants each cause a special capacity for its effect. That capacity is either the effect’s prior state, which is our doctrine, or a power of the cause, and a power that is neither the cause itself nor non-existent would be no different from anything else that is neither, and could pick out no effect; so the power is the self of the cause and the effect the self of the power. He then says the two are joined by inherence (samavaya).

Then the inherence needs a connection to what it joins, and that connection another, without end; or it needs none, and then conjunction needs none either, and inherence has nothing to do. How does his whole abide in its parts? In all of them together, and the whole can never be seen, since all the parts are never before the eyes; in each of them, and the whole is in many places at once, as Devadatta cannot be in Srughna and Pataliputra on the same day, or a cow would give milk from her horns. Origination is an act and needs a substrate, and “the jar is produced” would have to mean “the potter is produced.” A connection holds between two existents only, and a limit in time belongs to existents only: “the son of a barren woman was king before the coronation of Purnavarman” fixes nothing. The opponent asks what the potter is for if the jar is already in the clay; he arranges the clay in the jar’s shape, and the shape too belongs to the clay. Devadatta with his limbs drawn in and with his limbs stretched out is one Devadatta; fathers and mothers are recognized through all their changing states; milk is still there in the curds; and where the cause drops out of sight, as the fig seed does in its sprout, “birth” means only that the seed has become visible by gathering like particles and “death” that it has passed out of sight again, or else the child in the womb and the child on the bed would be two beings, and a man would be three men in childhood, manhood and age. The same arguments, Shankara notes, refute the Buddhist who holds that everything is momentary.

So in a hundred years no one will produce an effect that differs from its cause; the one cause of all appears in this effect and that, down to the last, as one actor appears in robe after robe, and that appearing is the basis of all the words and notions of the world. The other text is Chandogya 6.2.1 to 6.2.2, which raises the view that non-being was first, asks “how could being be born of non-being?” and settles for being alone, setting the effect in the same case as its cause before it arose; a newly made effect joined to its cause by inherence would break the promise of 6.1.3, “by which what is not heard is heard.” 2.1.19: and like a cloth. Folded, a cloth is hardly known to be a cloth, and its length and width are not known at all; unfolded, it shows itself, and shows that it was the same thing folded; so the effect lies unmanifest in its causes, the threads, and is made manifest by shuttle and loom. 2.1.20: and like the breaths. When a man holds his breath, the breaths rest in their cause and only life goes on; the bending and stretching of the limbs stop; when the breaths move again their effects return with them, and prana, apana and the rest are never anything other than air. What is decided: the effect is in no way other than its cause, before it arises or after, and the world is in no way other than Brahman, so the promise that by knowing one thing all is known is kept. Ramanuja reads the same sutras as teaching a real transformation of Brahman into the world that is its body; Shankara’s reading, given here, is of a change that belongs to name and form alone.

A new objection grows out of the last result. Scripture declares the other, the embodied soul, to be one with Brahman, “that is the Self; you are that, Shvetaketu” (Chandogya 6.8.7); or, reading “the other” as Brahman, scripture declares Brahman to be the self of the soul, “having created it, he entered into it” (Taittiriya 2.6), “with this living self let me enter and evolve names and forms” (Chandogya 6.3.2). Then the creative power is the soul’s own, and a free agent would make only what does it good, and none of birth, death, old age, disease and the rest of the net of suffering. No free man builds himself a prison and moves in. A stainless being would not take this unclean body for part of itself; it would drop the karma that pays in pain and keep the karma that pays in pleasure; it would remember having made the world, as every maker remembers his work; and as a magician withdraws his illusion when he pleases, it would draw the world back into itself. In fact it cannot draw back its own body. So the hypothesis of an intelligent cause fails on the charge of not doing what would do itself good.

2.1.22: but the greater one, because difference is declared. The creator is the Brahman that exceeds the embodied soul, omniscient and omnipotent, whose nature is eternal pure knowledge and freedom; nothing beneficial remains for it to do and nothing harmful to avoid, and no obstacle stands to its knowledge or power. The faults belong to the soul, and the soul is not the creator, since scripture declares a difference: “the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be thought on, to be meditated on” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.5); “the Self is to be searched out” (Chandogya 8.7.1); “then he is united with being” (6.8.1); “this embodied self, mounted by the intelligent Self” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.35), all of them relations of agent and object. Difference and non-difference live together as space and the space in a jar do. And once “you are that” has done its work, the soul’s wandering and Brahman’s creatorship vanish together, since the whole plurality born of wrong knowledge is sublated by right knowledge; where then is the creation, and where the fault? The world of good and evil deeds is a mistake about the adjuncts, body and the rest, which name and form set up, as our dying and being born are a mistake about a body that alone is born and dies. Until that mistake is sublated, the texts of difference hold, and the Brahman they show is above the soul and beyond the reach of its faults. 2.1.23: and as with stones, the objection cannot be made good. All minerals are earth, and some are diamonds and lapis lazuli, some crystals of middling worth, some stones fit only to throw at crows; from one soil come sandalwood and cucumbers; from one food come blood and hair. So the one Brahman holds within it the distinction of souls and highest Self and produces effects of every kind. The “and” of the sutra, Shankara says, points to two further grounds, that every effect has its origin in speech, and that one dreamer dreams a various world.

Shankara’s doctrine here is the one the whole adhyaya turns on: the soul and Brahman are one in essence and differ only through the adjuncts that nescience supplies, so that the texts of difference and the texts of oneness are both true, each at its own level. Ramanuja reads the “greater one” of 2.1.22 as a difference that is real and lasting, the soul being a mode of Brahman’s body.

The objector now watches a workshop. Potters and weavers make jars and cloth after gathering what they need, clay, staff, wheel, string; a Brahman without a second has nothing to gather. How can it create with no instruments to work with?

2.1.24: no, because it is like milk. Milk turns to curds and water to ice without any outside means, by a capacity in the substance itself. If the objector says milk needs heat, the answer is that heat only hurries what milk can do of itself, since no heat curdles air or space; and Brahman’s power is complete and needs no helper: “there is no effect and no instrument of him; none is seen equal to him or greater; his high power is revealed as manifold, inherent, acting as knowledge and strength” (Shvetashvatara 6.8). 2.1.25: the objector grants milk and other non-intelligent things their self-change, and points out that intelligent makers, potters above all, work only with a full set of tools; how should the intelligent Brahman differ? Like the gods and others in ordinary experience. Gods, fathers and rishis create palaces and chariots by mere intention; the spider spins its web out of itself; the crane conceives without a male; the lotus moves from pond to pond with nothing to carry it. The objector replies that the gods’ palaces are made from the gods’ bodies, matter again, that the spider’s thread is saliva thickened by the insects it eats, that the crane conceives from the sound of thunder, and that the lotus moves by its body as a creeper climbs a tree. Shankara grants all of it and says it misses the point. Potters and gods are alike intelligent, and potters need outside means while gods do not; a capacity observed in one case is no rule for every other. Brahman, intelligent, may be assumed to need no outside means, which is all the examples were asked to show.

Context: Chandogya 6.2.3, “it saw, may I be many, may I grow forth.” The seeing is the whole of the instrument; Brahman’s will does what the potter’s wheel does.

The objector returns with a dilemma, 2.1.26. Scripture says Brahman has no parts: “without parts, without action, tranquil, without fault, without taint” (Shvetashvatara 6.19); “that heavenly person is bodiless, within and without, unborn” (Mundaka 2.1.2); “described by no, no” (Brihadaranyaka 3.9.26); “neither coarse nor fine” (3.8.8). Earth has parts, so a part of it can become a pot while the rest stays earth. A partless Brahman that changes must change entirely, and then no Brahman is left behind the world, the texts that tell us to “see” it are pointless, since its effects are seen without trying, and the texts that call it unborn are contradicted. Give it parts to escape, and the texts that deny parts are broken, and a thing with parts is not eternal.

2.1.27: but no, because of scripture, and because Brahman rests on scripture. That the whole of Brahman changes does not follow, since the texts that speak of the world’s origin also show Brahman standing apart from its effects: “let me enter these three deities with this living self” (Chandogya 6.3.2); “one foot of him is all beings, three feet are the immortal in heaven” (3.12.6); the texts that place the unmodified Brahman in the heart; the text that unites the soul with being in deep sleep, which would mean nothing if the soul were always in Brahman’s effects and no unmodified Brahman existed; and the texts that deny Brahman to the senses while its effects are sensed. And Brahman is without parts because scripture says so, since scripture is the only authority about it: even gems, spells and herbs have powers that no one works out by reflection, and the Purana says, “do not apply reasoning to the unthinkable; the mark of the unthinkable is that it lies beyond all material causes.” The objector presses: no text can make a contradiction intelligible, and a partless thing that changes partly is a contradiction; options settle conflicts between injunctions, since taking the shodashin cup or not taking it is up to the man, and an existent thing is up to no one. Shankara: the break in Brahman is a figment of nescience, and a figment breaks nothing, as the moon a man with bad eyes sees doubled stays one moon.

Through name and form, which cannot be called either being or non-being, Brahman is the basis of the whole apparent world and stays unchanged above it; the distinction of names and forms has its origin in speech alone and leaves the partlessness untouched. The texts of change do not mean to teach change, which would have no fruit; they lead to the Brahman beyond the world, whose fruit is stated, “Janaka, you have reached fearlessness” (Brihadaranyaka 4.2.4). 2.1.28: for so it is in the self too, and there are various creations. A dreamer’s self holds a various creation without losing its unity, “there are no chariots there, no horses, no roads; he creates chariots, horses and roads” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.10), and gods and magicians put forth elephants and horses without ceasing to be one. 2.1.29: and the objection lies against the opponent’s own view. His pradhana is partless, unlimited and without sound, and it makes a world with parts, limits and sound; each of his three gunas is partless in itself, and each, helped by the other two, makes the part of the world that resembles it; call its powers parts, and the Vedantin claims powers for Brahman too; make it truly partite and it is no longer eternal. The atomist is in the same case, since a partless atom that joins another must join it entirely, and two atoms wholly interpenetrated are no larger than one.

Shankara’s own word here is for a change that belongs to name and form set up by nescience, with Brahman remaining as it was; later Advaita calls this vivarta, appearance without transformation. The clay in the pot is clay before the pot and after it, and the pot was never anything more than a name the clay was called by.

If the one Brahman makes a various world, it must have various powers, and the objector asks how that is known. 2.1.30: it is endowed with all powers, because scripture shows it: “he to whom belong all actions, all desires, all odors, all tastes, who embraces all this, who never speaks and is never surprised” (Chandogya 3.14.4); “whose desires are true, whose purposes are true” (8.7.1); “who knows all in its whole and all in its detail” (Mundaka 1.1.9); “at the command of that imperishable, sun and moon stand apart” (Brihadaranyaka 3.8.9). 2.1.31: granted, says the objector, yet scripture also says it has no organs, “without eyes, without ears, without speech, without mind” (3.8.8); gods with all their powers make things only through bodily instruments, and how can “no, no,” which strips every attribute, leave it all powers? That was explained already. Brahman is fathomed by scripture alone, the capacity of one being is no rule for another, and the powers belong to the element of plurality that nescience sets up, while the attributes are denied of Brahman in itself; and scripture closes the gap in so many words, “grasping without hands, hastening without feet, he sees without eyes, he hears without ears” (Shvetashvatara 3.19).

The objector now asks why. 2.1.32: Brahman is not the creator, because every agent has a motive. A man of sense acts after deliberation and will not take up even a small task without some purpose of his own, let alone a large one; scripture agrees, “everything is dear for the sake of the Self” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.5). Creating this world is a large task. If it serves some purpose of the highest Self, the self-sufficiency scripture gives it is lost; if it serves none, there is no activity; and if the Self creates without a motive the way a madman acts, its omniscience is lost.

2.1.33: but it is mere sport, as in ordinary life. Princes and other men who have nothing left to want still go out to their pleasure gardens for no purpose beyond the pleasure of it; breathing in and out goes on with no end in view, following its own nature. So the Lord’s activity is sport proceeding from his own nature, and neither reason nor scripture can find him another purpose. The creation that looks heavy to us is play to a power without limit, and if a close look finds some small motive even in human play, no such motive can be found in him whose wishes are already fulfilled. He is neither idle nor senseless, since scripture affirms the creation and his omniscience together. And Shankara adds the qualification that governs the whole pada: the scriptural teaching of creation does not concern the highest reality; it concerns the world of name and form that nescience sets up, and what it aims at is Brahman as the Self of all.

Shankara’s lila, then, is a word for activity without a motive, and the simile is as ordinary as a king walking in his garden or a man breathing. Nothing is lacking that the creation fills, and nothing is gained by it; it belongs to the apparent world, and the texts that describe it point past it.

Read alongside: Saundarya Lahari verse 1, where Shiva can stir to create only when joined with Shakti. That is a Shakta picture of the same question, and the bhashya does not use it; Shankara’s play needs no second principle, since the power at play is the Lord’s own maya.

Shankara says he now shakes the pole to test how firmly it is planted, and raises the hardest objection of all. Gods are made happy, animals wretched, men something between. A man who dealt with others like that would be called passionate and spiteful, and shruti and smriti call the Lord good. Pain and the final destruction of every creature are in his dispensation, which is a cruelty that even low men abhor. So the Lord is not the cause of the world.

2.1.34: inequality and cruelty do not touch him, because he acts with regard to something, and scripture shows it. If he made an unequal world on his own account he would deserve the blame; he makes it with regard to the merit and demerit of the creatures themselves, and the inequality is theirs. He stands as Parjanya stands: the rain god is the common cause of rice and barley and every plant, and the differences between them lie in their seeds; the Lord is the common cause of gods, men and animals, and the differences lie in the souls’ own works. Scripture says so: “he makes the one he would lead up out of these worlds do a good deed, and he makes the one he would lead down do a bad deed” (Kaushitaki 3.8); “one becomes good by good work, bad by bad work” (Brihadaranyaka 3.2.13); and smriti, “as men come to me, so I serve them” (Gita 4.11). 2.1.35: the objector answers that before the creation “this was being only, one without a second,” with no distinction and so no merit, so the first creation at least must have been equal, and he adds that merit depends on diverse conditions and diverse conditions on merit, which is a circle.

No, because samsara has no beginning. Merit and inequality are seed and sprout, each the cause of the other, and the circle is no fault once it has no first turn. 2.1.36: this stands to reason and is seen in scripture. If the world had a beginning it would arise without a cause, the released would be reborn, and pleasure and pain would be dealt out with no deed behind them; nescience by itself is uniform and cannot explain inequality, and it works through merit shaped by passion and hatred; no one is born without merit and demerit, and no merit is earned without a body, so a beginning sets up a seesaw that beginninglessness ends. Scripture: “let me enter with this living self” (Chandogya 6.3.2) calls the soul jiva, the sustainer of the breaths, before the creation, which it could not be if no earlier world had given it breaths; “the creator shaped sun and moon as before” (Rig Veda 10.190.3) knows earlier kalpas; and smriti, “neither its form nor its end nor its beginning nor its support is seen here” (Gita 15.3).

This is how the order of karma keeps the charge of partiality off Brahman. Beginningless karma is the cause of the inequality of joy and sorrow; the Lord gives each the fruit of his own deeds, as the one rain gives each seed its own plant; and the question “who sowed the first seed” has no object, since there was no first.

Context: Bhagavad Gita chapter 9 (“samo’ham sarva-bhuteshu na me dveshyo’sti na priyah”, I am the same to all beings; none is hateful to me and none dear).

The pada ends with a summing up. The teacher has answered every objection that other teachers raised against the sense of the Veda he established in the first book, difference of nature, the enjoyer and the enjoyed, the want of instruments, the whole or the part, purpose, partiality, and before he turns in the next pada to refuting what those teachers positively hold, he says why his own view should stand. 2.1.37: and because all the attributes are present. Whatever a cause of the world needs, this Brahman has: it knows all, it can do all, and it possesses the great power of maya. The doctrine founded on the Upanishads is open to no objection.