IDENTITY IN CHANGE.

83

save itself are inferior to it, and it can be nothing greater, for God is the greatest of all things." "But when you say," asked Blancombe, "that all other things are inferior to soul, you admit a difference in things. Does it not then appear strange to you that such vast diversities and differences of objects should all contain one identity, and that the most divine? When some beings are ignorant, and animals brutish, and light is extinguished before our eyes often, does not it become manifest that God cannot be in all, for their qualities are not such as you would ascribe to Him?" "You have exactly hit," said Vidyacharya, "the same objection as Madhwa, only he applied it more to the future. He argued that 'from the difference between omniscience and partial knowledge, omnipotence and inferior power, supremacy and subservience, the union of God and life cannot take place.' But then he must have failed to notice, that cause and effect are often dissimilar; yet you see hair and nails, which are without sense, grow from a sentient body; and vermin which have life spring every day from substances without life. The same food is transmuted in the animal frame into all sorts of flesh, blood, and bone; so the same soil produces different plants, and the vast bosom of earth, which is one, becomes pregnant with every variety of vegetable and mineral. There is nothing therefore absurd in saying, that as milk changes into curd, and water into ice, so spirit assumes different shapes; and as the spider spins a thread, such as you might not expect, out of its own substance, so Brahm, being omnipotent, puts forth the world and all that it contains, in

I am the moisture in the moving stream,
In sun and moon the bright essential beam;
The Mystic Word in Scripture's holy page,
In men the vigour of their manly age;
Sound in the air-earth's fragrant scent am I-
Life of all living-good men's Piety-
Seed of all Being-Brightness in the Flame-
In the wise Wisdom-in the famous Fame.

Griffith's Specimens of Old Hindú Poetry.

the infinite modifications of the form which he has thrown

around him."

"Perhaps we may consider by and by this answer of yours,' said Blancombe; "but in the mean time if the unlikeness of earthly objects to the Divine Being does not compel you, as it compelled Madhwa, to discriminate between them, tell me if a certain reverence towards the Supreme Ruler, whom you justly invoke as the Giver of knowledge, does not teach you to shrink from treading, as it were, upon Him, when you confound that Divine Majesty, to which the wisest of mankind can never even allude without a certain sobering awe, with the meanest of things under our feet? And especially, is it not a matter of trembling that we should make our Master as it were our servant, or our Judge the agent, and therefore a criminal answerable as regards every impure or bestial action into which animals or men may fall?"

"Your question," answered Vidyáchárya, "being a double one, will require a double answer. First, then, our doctrine is so far from being an irreverent one in its tendency, that it rather leads us to reverence every living thing upon this very ground, because it contains in it a particle of the Divine breath. That gross abuse of life, and sensual indulgence in horrible eating of even any animal, which some nations do not scruple to practise, is with us an abomination. As one of your own poets says,—

All shapes that creep, swim, fly, or run,
Are of the same clear substance spun;
The elemental heavens are one.

Therefore, instead of lowering God, our doctrine ought rather to be represented as raising all things below. But, secondly, with respect to impurity or sin, which guilty persons may commit, this is not, in so far as they know themselves to be partakers of the Divinity, but in so far as they are ignorant of it. Blind in the darkness of ignorance, the individual soul sympathises with body through its association with it, and although it is guided

THOUGH CONSCIOUSNESS REPUGNANT.

85

by the universal soul of which it is a part, even as being a branch of that great soul-tree which stands firm in the heavens with faces in every direction and embracing all, yet that guidance, you see clearly, can only make it act according to its own acquired propensities; just as the same fertilising rain causes one plant to bear good fruit, and another to grow up barren oi poisonous."

"Your answer," said Blancombe, "is certainly very ingenious; but yet it seems to betray the existence of something in the world separate from God, as for instance those very propensities, or whatever it is which produces, or enables the individual soul to acquire them. Here then possibly we ought to inquire what that something is; or perhaps it may lead us in the same direction if I venture to ask, whether the consciousness of every man and all men does not utter an audible protest against all this theory of our imperfect intelligences being identical with the Omniscient, or our weakness, folly, and sinfulness, with the Divine? Do we not feel and know that we are flesh and blood; that the animals around us are even lower than ourselves in the scale of creation; and that the earth we tread is solid matter?"

"Why, that we feel something of the kind, need not be denied," answered the A'chárya, "but that we know it, is quite a different assertion; for, in fact, that very feeling is partly ajnána and partly Máyά.”

BLAN. "By ajnána you mean probably ignorance."

VID. "Certainly."

BLAN. "But what is Máyá?”

VID. "Clearly, Máyá is illusion."

BLAN. "Are we then illuded, when we affirm ourselves to be here present, and to be conversing, as in fact we are?"

VID. 66 'Why, that our souls are here present, I am not obliged to deny; but that they are only present in virtue of the presence so far of the supreme soul, is what I steadfastly maintain; and again, that we are flesh and blood, as you seemed,

86

THE THREE QUALITIES.

perhaps without duly considering it, to say, as if these limbs which may be mutilated in all sorts of ways without destroying ourselves, made up our actual self, is what no pious person could concede. But now, how much of ignorance or mere ajnána there must be in all the conceptions which you have rapidly glanced at, is clear even from the tenor of our conversation; for the Múni, in expounding the opinions of the Saugatas, has both made the soul to consist in intelligence, which rather belongs to bodily organs, and also has avowedly rejected all our sacred revelation; and again, Sadananda, because he thinks natural objects act according to their inherent properties, removes all necessity of an Iswara, or supreme Lord; and again, to me that which he calls pracriti, or plastic nature, appears to be purely Máyá: so that somewhere among us there is certainly ignorance; and no one has yet shewn, at all events, why it should not be ignorance, as I contend, for the individual soul to conceive of itself as distinct from the supreme, rather than to think in whatever way other persons may prefer."

"Well," said Blancombe, "I have to thank you for correcting me as to the flesh and blood; by which, however, all I intended to say was, that there is an external world patent to our observation and consciousness, which I am not able to identify with the essence of the supreme soul."

"Neither do I wish you to do so," answered Vidyáchárya; "but if you wish to avoid ignorance, you must conceive of the external world as Máyá.”

"Once more, then, will you be good enough to explain to me more distinctly," asked Blancombe, "what you understand by Máy{?”

"I will endeavour to do so," answered the Achárya, “though indeed the subject is a very difficult one. But now you are aware that whatever we feel or perceive externally may fall under some one of three descriptive heads, either under goodness, or passion, or darkness, or possibly under a blending of more than one of them: for either we rejoice, or at least acquiesce in

things around us, or again we are irritated or roused by them, or again we are stupid and bewildered as regards them. These three, then, are the three Gunas, which make up what I have heard certain Europeans, in attempting to explain our doctrine, have called the limitations of human thought, but by which I seem to myself rather to mean the conditions of sensation, or the circumstances within the range of which all outward sensation or perception must necessarily fall. You may, if you please, call them impressions, or the three catagories of impressions. Most briefly, perhaps, Máyá, which comprehends the three, may be termed the seeming of things so and so, however they may seem. That objects, however, seem to us as they are, or even that they are at all in any true sense of being, we have nothing to assure us; for change, fluctuation, misconception or false appearance, and insubstantiality, seem to be their characteristics. This follows as a consequence, partly from what you have heard in the reasonings of our friends here about the difficulty of reaching any substance underlying the manifold appearances of the outer world, and partly from what I have heard European philosophers have argued with more or less subtlety in a similar direction. The existence of a stone or a tree consists, as far as we know, in certain sensations only which we have of its hardness, or its solidity, or its growth; but what is underneath, hard, or solid, or growing, no one has ever manifested, so that in fact it may be called Máyá or appearance. Thus the Múni almost proved to you that matter is ignorance. If ever, then, the individual soul fancies itself to consist of such appearances, it is as much in error as a man who, seeing a rope coiled up, mistakes it for a serpent."

"But if I understood you aright some time back," Blancombe here said, "you objected to the doctrine of the Saugatas or of the Bauddhas generally, that it made the existence of external objects uncertain, and you relied upon our perceptions as sufficient proof to us of such existence. How then do these two positions of yours agree together?"