40. It is accompanied by twice ten fingers and their nails on them; and with a couple of arms and palms and two or more hands and eyes (in the cases of gods and giants). 41. The body is the nest of the bird of the mind, and it is hole of the snake of lust; it is the cave of the goblin of greediness, and the den of the lion of life. 42. It is a chain at the feet of the elephant of pride, and a lake of the lotuses of our desire; The lord Brahmá looked upon his handsome body, and saw it was good. 43. Then the lord thought in himself, from his view of the three times of the past, present and future, and from his sight of the vault of heaven, with a dark mist as a group of flying locusts. 44. “What is this boundless space, and what had it been before. How came I to being?” Thus pondering in himself, he was enlightened in his soul. (Thus did Adam inquire about his birth, and the production of the world in Milton’s Paradise Lost). 45. He saw in his mind the different past creations, and recollected the various religions and their various sects, which had grown upon earth one after the other. 46. He produced the holy Vedas as the spring does its flowers; and formed with ease all varieties of creatures from their archetypes in his mind. 47. He set them in their various laws and customs, as he saw them in the city of his mind, for the purpose of their temporal and spiritual welfare. 48. He thought upon the innumerable varieties of sástras which had existed before, and all of which came to exist on earth in their visible forms, from their prototypes in his eternal mind; like the flowers springing from the womb of the vernal season. 49. Thus O Ráma! did Brahmá take upon him the form of the lotus-born, and create by his activity, all the different creatures upon their models existent in his mind, which took their various forms in the visible world at his will. (So the Sufi and Platonic doctrine of the phenomenal, as a copy of the noumena, or the _suari zahiri_ as but a shadow of the _suvari manavi_ or _catini_. See Allami). CHAPTER XLV. DEPENDANCE OF ALL ON GOD. Argument. The mind being a finite production, its product of the world, is as unreal as the thoughts of the mind. Vasishtha continued:—The world appearing as substantial, has nothing substantive in it; it is all a vacuity and mere representation of the imageries and vagaries of the mind. 2. Neither is time nor space filled by any world at all, but by the great spirit, who has no form except that of vacuum. (The spirit of God fills the infinite vacuity from all eternity). 3. This is all imaginary, and as visionary as a city seen in a dream; whatever is seen any where is fallacy, and existing in the infinite vacuity. (All is void amidst the great void of Brahma’s Mind). 4. It is a painting without its base, and a vision of unrealities; it is an uncreated creation, and a variegated picture in empty air (without its canvas).