the ‘True,’ which the holy hermits in the forest are said to worship, is not to be the highest Brahman, but only Hira/n/yagarbha!—­And why?—­Only because the system so demands it, the system which teaches that those who know the highest Brahman become on their death one with it, without having to resort to any other place.  The passage on which this latter tenet is chiefly based is B/ri/.  Up.  IV, 4, 6, 7, where, with the fate of him who at his death has desires, and whose soul therefore enters a new body after having departed from the old one, accompanied by all the pra/n/as, there is contrasted the fate of the sage free from all desires.  ’But as to the man who does not desire, who not desiring, freed from desires is satisfied in his desires, or desires the Self only, the vital spirits of him (tasya) do not depart—­being Brahman he goes to Brahman.’

We have seen above (p. lxxx) that this passage is referred to in the important Sutras on whose right interpretation it, in the first place, depends whether or not we must admit the Sutrakara to have acknowledged the distinction of a para and an apara vidya.  Here the passage interests us as throwing light on the way in which Sa@nkara systematises.  He looks on the preceding part of the chapter as describing what happens to the souls of all those who do not know the highest Brahman, inclusive of those who know the lower Brahman only.  They pass out of the old bodies followed by all pra/n/as and enter new bodies.  He, on the other hand, section 6 continues, who knows the true Brahman, does not pass out of the body, but becomes one with Brahman then and there.  This interpretation of the purport of the entire chapter is not impossibly right, although I am rather inclined to think that the chapter aims at setting forth in its earlier part the future of him who does not know Brahman at all, while the latter part of section 6 passes on to him who does know Brahman (i.e.  Brahman pure and simple, the text knowing of no distinction of the so-called lower and higher Brahman).  In explaining section 6 Sa@nkara lays stress upon the clause ’na tasya pra/n/a utkramanti,’ ‘his vital spirits do not pass out,’ taking this to signify that the soul with the vital spirits does not move at all, and thus does not ascend to the world of Brahman; while the purport of the clause may simply be that the soul and vital spirits do not go anywhere else, i.e. do not enter a new body, but are united, somehow or other, with Brahman.  On Sa@nkara’s interpretation there immediately arises a new difficulty.  In the slokas, quoted under sections 8 and 9, the description of the small old path which leads to the svargaloka and higher on clearly refers—­as noticed already above—­to the path through the veins, primarily the sushum/n/a, on which, according to so many other passages, the soul of the wise mounts upwards.  But that path is, according to Sa@nkara, followed by him only who has not risen above the lower knowledge, and yet the slokas have manifestly to be connected with what is said in the latter half of 6 about the owner of the para vidya.  Hence Sa@nkara sees himself driven to explain the slokas in 8 and 9 (of which a faithful translation is given in Professor Max Mueller’s version) as follows: