The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 1 (of 4)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 1 (of 4)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
33. The word _Jíva_ or the living soul (_zoa_), is brought under a
figurative sense, ‘to mean something real in the unreal body’. Hence
Brahmá is said to be the life and soul of the unreal world.
34. The gross embodied soul, is of the form of vacuum like the mind and
yet it imagines itself to reside in an _ovum_ in the body, as Brahmá
is supposed to be seated in the mundane egg. (_i.e._ The soul loses its
light airy shape and free range, by being confined in the body).
35. Some view the spirit of God as floating on the surface of the
(ante-mundane) waters (in the form of _Náráyana_); and others view
it in the person of the Lord of creatures (Brahmá); while there are
others, who look at it as infused throughout the creation in the figure
of _viráj_. These are called the subtile and gross bodies of the soul
(_sthúla_ and _súkshma saríras_).
36. The soul or spirit is the spacious womb of productions, and the
means of executing its own purposes, and of knowing the proper time and
place, and the article and the manner of action (modus operandi).
37. The mind is the inventor of words, expressive of ideas (in the
soul), and subjects itself to the arbitary sounds of its own invention.
Hence God is erroneously said to be embodied in words (_sabda Brahma_
of Mimánsá philosophy) in this world of errors.
38. The unproduced and self-born Brahmá, that has risen of himself (and
represents the mind), is as unreal as the soaring of a man in the sky
in his dream.
39. This all supporting-embodied soul, is the prime Lord of creatures,
who is said to have formed this illusory frame of the world.
40. But there was nothing formed or born in it (in reality); nor is
there any substance to be found in the world. It is the same vacuous
form of Brahma still, whose essence is known to extend as the infinite
space itself.
41. Things appearing as real, are as unreal as an imaginary city
(Utopia), which presents a variety (of forms and colours) to the fancy,
without being built or painted by any body. (The phenomenal appearance
of the world, is likened to a phantasmagoria).
42. Nothing that is unmade or unthought of, can be real (either in
substance or idea); and the gods Brahmá and others, being freed from
their avocations at the universal dissolution of existence, could
neither resume their functions nor have materials for the same.
43. The self-born Brahmá, having then neither his remembrance of the
past, nor any material appliance at hand, could neither form an ideal
or material world out of nothing. Therefore production of Brahmá and
formation of the universe are alike (chimerical).
44. The earth and all other existences, are but the eternal ideas of
the divine mind, and they appear to us as objects of a dream in our
waking state: (when they vanish into airy nothing).
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