principle independent from the Lord like the pradhâna of the Sâ@nkhyas;
the world is nothing but a manifestation of the Lord's wonderful power,
and hence is unsubstantial, if we take the term 'substance' in its
strict sense. And, again, everything material is immeasurably inferior
in nature to the highest spiritual principle from which it has emanated,
and which it now hides from the individual soul. But neither
unsubstantiality nor inferiority of the kind mentioned constitutes
unreality in the sense in which the Mâyâ of /S/a@nkara is unreal.
According to the latter the whole world is nothing but an erroneous
appearance, as unreal as the snake, for which a piece of rope is
mistaken by the belated traveller, and disappearing just as the imagined
snake does as soon as the light of true knowledge has risen. But this is
certainly not the impression left on the mind by a comprehensive review
of the Upanishads which dwells on their general scope, and does not
confine itself to the undue urging of what may be implied in some
detached passages. The Upanishads do not call upon us to look upon the
whole world as a baseless illusion to be destroyed by knowledge; the
great error which they admonish us to relinquish is rather that things
have a separate individual existence, and are not tied together by the
bond of being all of them effects of Brahman, or Brahman itself. They do
not say that true knowledge sublates this false world, as /S/a@nkara
says, but that it enables the sage to extricate himself from the
world--the inferior mûrta rûpa of Brahman, to use an expression of the
B/ri/hadâra/n/yaka--and to become one with Brahman in its highest form.
'We are to see everything in Brahman, and Brahman in everything;' the
natural meaning of this is, 'we are to look upon this whole world as a
true manifestation of Brahman, as sprung from it and animated by it.'
The mâyâvâdin has indeed appropriated the above saying also, and
interpreted it so as to fall in with his theory; but he is able to do so
only by perverting its manifest sense. For him it would be appropriate