The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja: Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48
Religion
The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja: Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48
Vedanta
The Sûtras also maintain the same doctrine, cp. I, 1, 17; I, 2, 21; II,
1, 22; and others. They therein follow Scripture, which in several
places refers to the highest and the individual soul as standing over
against each other, cp. e.g. 'He who dwells in the Self and within the
Self, whom the Self does not know, whose body the Self is, who rules the
Self from within' (Bri. Up. III, 7, 22); 'Embraced by the intelligent
Self (Bri. Up. IV, 3, 21); 'Mounted by the intelligent Self (IV, 3, 35).
Nor can the individual Self become one with the highest Self by freeing
itself from Nescience, with the help of the means of final Release; for
that which admits of being the abode of Nescience can never become quite
incapable of it. So the Purâna says, 'It is false to maintain that the
individual Self and the highest Self enter into real union; for one
substance cannot pass over into the nature of another substance.'
Accordingly the Bhagavad Gîtâ declares that the released soul attains
only the same attributes as the highest Self. 'Abiding by this knowledge,
they, attaining to an equality of attributes with me, do neither come
forth at the time of creation, nor are troubled at the time of general
destruction' (XIV, 2). Similarly our Purâna says, 'That Brahman leads
him who meditates on it, and who is capable of change, towards its own
being (âtmabhâva), in the same way as the magnet attracts the iron' (Vi.
Pu. VI, 7, 30). Here the phrase 'leads him towards his own being' means
'imparts to him a nature like his own' (not 'completely identifies him
with itself'); for the attracted body does not become essentially one
with the body attracting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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