Q. How is the spirit different from the five sheaths?

A. This is being illustrated by an example:—­“This is my cow,” “this is my calf,” “this is my son or daughter,” “this is my wife,” “this is my anandamaya sheath,” and so on*—­the spirit can never be connected with these concepts; it is different from and witness of them all.  For it is said in the Upanishad—­[The spirit is] “naught of sound, of touch, of form, or colour, of taste, or of smell; it is everlasting, having no beginning or end, superior [in order of subjectivity] to Prakriti (differentiated matter); whoever correctly understands it as such attains mukti (liberation).”  The spirit has also been called (above) sat, chit, and ananda.

Q. What is meant by its being sat (presence)?

A. Existing unchanged in the three divisions of time and uninfluenced by anything else.

Q. What by being chit (consciousness)?

A. Manifesting itself without depending upon anything else, and containing the germ of everything in itself.

Q. What by being ananda (bliss)?

A. The ne plus ultra of bliss.

Whoever knows without doubt and apprehension of its being otherwise, the self as being one with Brahma or spirit, which is eternal, non-dual and unconditioned, attains moksha (liberation from conditioned existence.)

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* The “heresy of individuality,” or attavada of the Buddhists.
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Was Writing Known Before Panini?

I am entrusted with the task of putting together some facts which would support the view that the art of writing was known in India before the time of our grammarian—­the Siva-taught Panini.  Professor Max Muller has maintained the contrary opinion ever since 1856, and has the approbation of other illustrious Western scholars.  Stated briefly, their position is that the entire absence of any mention of “writing, reading, paper, or pen” in the Vedas, or during the whole of the Brahmana period, and the almost, if not quite, as complete silence as to them throughout the Sutra period, “lead us to suppose that even then [the Sutra period], though the art of writing began to be known, the whole literature of India was preserved by oral tradition only.” ("Hist.  Sans.  Lit.,” p. 501.) To support this theory, he expands the mnemonic faculty of our respected ancestors to such a phenomenal degree that, like the bull’s hide of Queen Dido, it is made to embrace the whole ground needed for the proposed city of refuge, to which discomfited savants may flee when hard pressed.  Considering that Professor Weber—­a gentleman who, we observe, likes to distil the essence of Aryan aeons down into an attar of no greater volume than the capacity of the Biblical period—­admits that Europe now possesses 10,000 of our Sanscrit texts; and considering that we have, or have had, many other tens of thousands which the parsimony of Karma has hitherto withheld from the museums and libraries of Europe, what a memory must have been theirs!