The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya: Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1
Religion
The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya: Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1
Vedanta
If--the purvapakshin resumes--the individual gods and so on did, like
the individual animals, originate and pass away in an unbroken
succession so that there would be no break of the course of practical
existence including denominations, things denominated and agents
denominating; the connexion (between word and thing) would be eternal,
and the objection as to a contradiction with reference to the word
(raised in Sutra 27) would thereby be refuted. But if, as /S/ruti and
Sm/ri/ti declare, the whole threefold world periodically divests itself
of name and form, and is entirely dissolved (at the end of a kalpa), and
is after that produced anew; how can the contradiction be considered to
have been removed?
To this we reply: 'On account of the sameness of name and form.'--Even
then the beginninglessness of the world will have to be admitted (a
point which the teacher will prove later on: II, 1, 36). And in the
beginningless sa/m/sara we have to look on the (relative) beginning, and
the dissolution connected with a new kalpa in the same light in which we
look on the sleeping and waking states, which, although in them
according to Scripture (a kind of) dissolution and origination take
place, do not give rise to any contradiction, since in the later waking
state (subsequent to the state of sleep) the practical existence is
carried on just as in the former one. That in the sleeping and the
waking states dissolution and origination take place is stated Kaush.
Up. III, 3, 'When a man being asleep sees no dream whatever he becomes
one with that pra/n/a alone. Then speech goes to him with all names, the
eye with all forms, the ear with all sounds, the mind with all thoughts.
And when he awakes then, as from a burning fire, sparks proceed in all
directions, thus from that Self the pra/n/as proceed, each towards its
place; from the pra/n/as the gods, from the gods the worlds.'
Well, the purvapakshin resumes, it may be that no contradiction arises
in the case of sleep, as during the sleep of one person the practical
existence of other persons suffers no interruption, and as the sleeping
person himself when waking from sleep may resume the very same form of
practical existence which was his previously to his sleep. The case of a
mahapralaya (i.e. a general annihilation of the world) is however a
different one, as then the entire current of practical existence is
interrupted, and the form of existence of a previous kalpa can be
resumed in a subsequent kalpa no more than an individual can resume that
form of existence which it enjoyed in a former birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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