there is relation there is dualism.”  The one life is either “Mukta” (absolute and unconditioned), and can have no relation to anything nor to any one; or it is “Baddha” (bound and conditioned), and then it cannot be called the absolute; the limitation, moreover, necessitating another deity as powerful as the first to account for all the evil in this world.  Hence, the Arahat secret doctrine on cosmogony admits but of one absolute, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated unconsciousness (so to translate) of an element (the word being used for want of a better term) absolutely independent of everything else in the universe; a something ever present or ubiquitous, a Presence which ever was, is, and will be, whether there is a God, gods, or none, whether there is a universe, or no universe, existing during the eternal cycles of Maha Yugs, during the Pralayas as during the periods of Manvantara, and this is space, the field for the operation of the eternal Forces and natural Law, the basis (as Mr. Subba Row rightly calls it) upon which take place the eternal intercorrelations of Akasa-Prakriti; guided by the unconscious regular pulsations of Sakti, the breath or power of a conscious deity, the theists would say; the eternal energy of an eternal, unconscious Law, say the Buddhists.  Space, then, or “Fan, Bar-nang” (Maha Sunyata) or, as it is called by Lao-tze, the “Emptiness,” is the nature of the Buddhist Absolute. (See Confucius’ “Praise of the Abyss.”) The word jiva, then, could never be applied by the Arahats to the Seventh Principle, since it is only through its correlation or contact with matter that Fo-hat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious life; and that to the question “how can unconsciousness generate consciousness?” the answer would be:  “Was the seed which generated a Bacon or a Newton self-conscious?”

Note V.

To our European readers, deceived by the phonetic similarity, it must not be thought that the name “Brahman” is identical in this connection with Brahma or Iswara, the personal God.  The Upanishads—­the Vedanta Scriptures—­mention no such God, and one would vainly seek in them any allusions to a conscious deity.  The Brahman, or Parabrahm, the absolute of the Vedantins, is neuter and unconscious, and has no connection with the masculine Brahma of the Hindu Triad, or Trimurti.  Some Orientalists rightly believe the name derived from the verb “Brih,” to grow or increase, and to be in this sense the universal expansive force of Nature, the vivifying and spiritual principle or power spread throughout the universe, and which, in its collectivity, is the one Absoluteness, the one Life and the only Reality.

—­H.P.  Blavatsky

Septenary Division in Different Indian Systems

We give below in a tabular form the classifications, adopted by
Buddhist and by Vedantic teachers, of the principles in man:—­