To the conclusion that the Sutrakara did not hold the doctrine of the absolute identity of the highest and the individual soul in the sense of /S/a@nkara, we are further led by some other indications to be met with here and there in the Sutras. In the conspectus of contents we have had occasion to direct attention to the important Sutra II, 1, 22, which distinctly enunciates that the Lord is adhika, i.e. additional to, or different from, the individual soul, since Scripture declares the two to be different. Analogously I, 2, 20 lays stress on the fact that the /s/arira is not the antaryamin, because the Madhyandinas, as well as the Ka/n/vas, speak of him in their texts as different (bhedena enam adhiyate), and in 22 the /s/arira and the pradhana are referred to as the two 'others' (itarau) of whom the text predicates distinctive attributes separating them from the highest Lord. The word 'itara' (the other one) appears in several other passages (I, 1, 16; I, 3, 16; II, 1, 21) as a kind of technical term denoting the individual soul in contradistinction from the Lord. The /S/a@nkaras indeed maintain that all those passages refer to an unreal distinction due to avidya. But this is just what we should like to see proved, and the proof offered in no case amounts to more than a reference to the system which demands that the Sutras should be thus understood. If we accept the interpretations of the school of /S/a@nkara, it remains altogether unintelligible why the Sutrakara should never hint even at what /S/a@nkara is anxious again and again to point out at length, viz. that the greater part of the work contains a kind of exoteric doctrine only, ever tending to mislead the student who does not keep in view what its nature is. If other reasons should make it probable that the Sutrakara was anxious to hide the true doctrine of the Upanishads as a sort of esoteric teaching, we might be more ready to accept /S/a@nkara's mode of interpretation. But no such reasons are forthcoming; nowhere among the avowed followers of the /S/a@nkara system is there any tendency to treat the kernel of their philosophy as something to be jealously guarded and hidden. On the contrary, they all, from Gau/d/apada down to the most modern writer, consider it their most important, nay, only task to inculcate again and again in the clearest and most unambiguous language that all appearance of multiplicity is a vain illusion, that the Lord and the individual souls are in reality one, and that all knowledge but this one knowledge is without true value.