The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 2 (of 4), Part 1 (of 2)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 2 (of 4), Part 1 (of 2)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
35. Here (in _Yama’s_ court), the soul is pronounced to reap the reward
of its acts, whereby it ascends either to the blissful heaven above, or
descends to the painful hell below.
36. After having enjoyed the bliss of heaven, or suffered the torment of
hell, it is doomed to wander in this earth again, to reap the reward of
its acts in repeated transmigrations.
37. The soul springs up as a paddy plant, and brings forth the grains of
intelligence; and then being assembled by the senses, it becomes an
animal, and lastly an intelligent being.
_i.e._ The insensible vegetable, entering into the animal body in the form
of food, is converted to a sensible but irrational soul; but entering as
food in the body of man, it turns to a rational and human soul. The one
Universal soul is thus diversified in different beings. (It is the plant
and food that sustains and nourishes all souls. Gloss).
38. The soul contains in itself the germs of all its senses, which lie
dormant in it for want of its bodily organs. It is contained in the
semen virilis of man, which passing into the uterus, produces the fœtus
in the womb of the female.
39. The fœtus then becomes either well-formed or deformed, according to
the good or evil deeds of the person in its past state; and brings forth
the infant of a goodly or ill shapen appearance.
40. It then perceives the moonlike beauty of youthful bloom, and its
amorous disposition coming upon itself; and feels afterwards the effects
of hoary old age, defacing its lotus-like face, as the sleets of snow,
shatter and shrivel the lotus leaflets.
41. At last it undergoes the pains of disease and death, and feels the
same insensibility of Euthanasia as before, and finds again as in a
dream its taking of a new form.
42. It again believes itself to be carried to the region of Pluto, and
subjected to the former kinds of revolution; and thus it continues to
conceive its transmigration, in endless births and various forms.
43. Thus the aerial spirit goes on thinking, for ever in its own
etherial sphere, all its ceaseless metempsychosis, until its final
liberation from this changeful state.
44. Lílá said:—Tell me kindly, O good goddess! for the enlightenment of
my understanding, how this misconception of its changeableness, first
came upon the soul in the beginning.
45. The goddess replied:—It is the gross view of the abstract, that
causes us to assume the discrete spirit, in the concrete forms of the
earth and sky and rocks and trees (all of which subsist in the spirit,
and are unsubstantial in themselves).
46. As the divine intellect manifests itself, as the soul and model of
all forms; so we see these manifestations, in the transcendental sphere
of its pure intelligence.
47. In the beginning, God conceived himself as the lord of creation
(Brahmá); and then as it were in a dream, he saw in himself, all the
forms as they continue to this time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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