the passage, ‘He who moves about happy in dreams,’
&c. does not refer to a being different from the seeing
person within the eye spoken of in the first chapter,
(but treats of the same topic) as appears from the
introductory clause, ‘I shall explain him further
to you.’ Moreover[187], a person who is
conscious of having seen an elephant in a dream and
of no longer seeing it when awake discards in the
waking state the object which he had seen (in his
sleep), but recognises himself when awake to be the
same person who saw something in the dream.—Thus
in the third section also Prajapati does indeed declare
the absence of all particular cognition in the state
of deep sleep, but does not contest the identity of
the cognising Self (’In that way he does not
know himself that he is I, nor all these beings’).
The following clause also, ’He is gone to utter
annihilation,’ is meant to intimate only the
annihilation of all specific cognition, not the annihilation
of the cogniser. For there is no destruction
of the knowing of the knower as—according
to another scriptural passage (B/ri/. Up.
IV, 3, 30)—that is imperishable.—Thus,
again, in the fourth section the introductory phrase
of Prajapati is, ’I shall explain him further
to you and nothing different from this;’ he
thereupon refutes the connexion (of the Self) with
the body and other limiting conditions (’Maghavat,
this body is mortal,’ &c.), shows the individual
soul—which is there called ’the serene
being’—in the state when it has reached
the nature of Brahman (’It appears in its own
form’), and thus proves the soul to be non-different
from the highest Brahman whose characteristics are
immortality and fearlessness.
Some (teachers) however are of opinion that if the
highest Self is meant (in the fourth section) it would
be inappropriate to understand the words ‘This
(him) I will explain further,’ &c., as referring
to the individual soul, and therefore suppose that
the reference is (not to the individual soul forming
the topic of the three preceding sections, but) to
the Self possessing the qualities of freeness from
sin, &c., which Self is pointed out at the beginning
of the entire chapter (VII, 1).—Against
this interpretation we remark that, in the first place,
it disregards the direct enunciation of the pronoun
(i.e. the ‘this’ in ‘this I will
explain’) which rests on something approximate
(i.e. refers to something mentioned not far off),
and, in the second place, is opposed to the word ‘further’
(or ‘again’) met with in the text, since
from that interpretation it would follow that what
had been discussed in the preceding sections is not
again discussed in the subsequent section. Moreover,
if Prajapati, after having made a promise in the clause,
’This I shall explain’ (where that clause
occurs for the first time), did previously to the
fourth section explain a different topic in each section,
we should have to conclude that he acted deceitfully.—Hence
(our opinion about the purport of the whole chapter