punishment) is hanging over my head; it might fall if I did not carry out his command.’  In the same manner this whole world inclusive of fire, air, sun, and so on, regularly carries on its manifold functions from fear of Brahman; hence Brahman as inspiring fear is compared to a thunderbolt.  Similarly, another scriptural passage, whose topic is Brahman, declares, ’From terror of it the wind blows, from terror the sun rises; from terror of it Agni and Indra, yea, Death runs as the fifth.’—­That Brahman is what is referred to in our passage, further follows from the declaration that the fruit of its cognition is immortality.  For that immortality is the fruit of the knowledge of Brahman is known, for instance, from the mantra, ’A man who knows him only passes over death, there is no other path to go’ (Svet.  Up.  VI, 15).—­That immortality which the purvapakshin asserts to be sometimes represented as the fruit of the knowledge of the air is a merely relative one; for there (i.e. in the chapter from which the passage is quoted) at first the highest Self is spoken of, by means of a new topic being started (B/ri/.  Up.  III, 4), and thereupon the inferior nature of the air and so on is referred to. (’Everything else is evil.’)—­That in the passage under discussion the highest Self is meant appears finally from the general subject-matter; for the question (asked by Na/k/iketas in I, 2, 14, ’That which thou seest as neither this nor that, as neither effect nor cause, as neither past nor future tell me that’) refers to the highest Self.

40.  The light (is Brahman), on account of that (Brahman) being seen (in the scriptural passage).

We read in Scripture, ’Thus does that serene being, arising from this body, appear in its own form as soon as it has approached the highest light’ (Ch.  Up.  VIII, 12, 3).  Here the doubt arises whether the word ‘light’ denotes the (physical) light, which is the object of sight and dispels darkness, or the highest Brahman.

The purvapakshin maintains that the word ‘light’ denotes the well-known (physical) light, because that is the conventional sense of the word.  For while it is to be admitted that in another passage, discussed under I, 1, 24, the word ‘light’ does, owing to the general topic of the chapter, divest itself of its ordinary meaning and denote Brahman, there is in our passage no similar reason for setting the ordinary meaning aside.  Moreover, it is stated in the chapter treating of the na/d/is of the body, that a man going to final release reaches the sun (’When he departs from this body then he departs upwards by those very rays;’ Ch.  Up.  VIII, 6, 5).  Hence we conclude that the word ‘light’ denotes, in our passage, the ordinary light.