The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol 4 (of 4), Part 1 (of 2)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol 4 (of 4), Part 1 (of 2)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
OR THE LATTER HALF OR SUPPLEMENT
TO THE
NIRVÁNA PRAKARANA.
CHAPTER I.
ON UNINTENTIONAL ACTS AND ACTIONS.
Argument:—The manner how the liberated should conduct themselves
in life, with renunciation of their egoism and selfish desires.
Ráma rejoined:—The renunciation of the notion of one’s personality or
egoism in his own person, being attended by its attendant evil of
inertness and inactivity (lit. want of acts), it naturally brings on a
premature decay and decline, and the eventual falling off of the body in
a short time: how then is it possible sir, for an indifferent person of
this kind, to practice his actions and discharge the active duties of
life (as you preached in your last lecture)?
2. Vasishtha replied:—It is possible Ráma, for the living person to
resign his false ideas and not for one that is dead and gone (because
the life of a man is independent of his notions; while the notions are
dependant on his life). Hear me now to expound this truth, and it will
greatly please your ears: (lit. it will be an ornament to your ears).
3. The idea of one’s egoism (or his personality in own person), is said
to be an idealism by idealists; but it is the conception of the
signification of the word air or vacuity (which is the essence of the
Deity), that is represented as the repudiation of that erroneous notion.
4. The idealists represent the sense of all substances, as a creation of
the imagination, while it is the idea of a pure vacuum, which they say
to be the resignation of this erroneous conception. (The vacuistic
Vasishtha treats here in length of the nullity of all substances, and
the eternity of all pervading vacuum, and establishes the doctrine of
the nothingness of the world and its God).
5. The idea of any thing in the world as something in reality, is said
to be mere imaginary by the best and wisest of men; but the belief of
all things as an empty nothing, displaces the error of thought from the
mind. Since all things are reduced to and return to nothing, it is this
alone which is the ever lasting something. (_Ullum est nullum, et nullum
est ullum_).
6. Know thy remembrance of anything, is thy imagination of it only, and
its forgetfulness alone is good for thee; therefore try to blot out all
thy former impressions from thy mind, as if they were never impressed on
it.
7. Efface from thy mind the memory of all thou hast felt or unfelt
(_i.e._ fancied), and remain silent and secluded like a block after thy
forgetfulness of all things whatsoever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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