is fire.  The colloquy then turns to what we must consider an altogether new topic, Artabhaga asking, ’When this man (ayam purusha) dies, do the vital spirits depart from him or not?’ and Yajnavalkya answering, ’No, they are gathered up in him; he swells, he is inflated; inflated the dead (body) is lying.’—­Now this is for Sa@nkara an important passage, as we have already seen above (p. lxxxi); for he employs it, in his comment on Ved.-sutra IV, 2, 13, for the purpose of proving that the passage B/ri/.  Up.  IV, 4, 6 really means that the vital spirits do not, at the moment of death, depart from the true sage.  Hence the present passage also must refer to him who possesses the highest knowledge; hence the ’ayam purusha’ must be ‘that man,’ i.e. the man who possesses the highest knowledge, and the highest knowledge then must be found in the preceding clause which says that death itself may be conquered by water.  But, as Ramanuja also remarks, neither does the context favour the assumption that the highest knowledge is referred to, nor do the words of section 11 contain any indication that what is meant is the merging of the Self of the true Sage in Brahman.  With the interpretation given by Ramanuja himself, viz. that the pra/n/as do not depart from the jiva of the dying man, but accompany it into a new body, I can agree as little (although he no doubt rightly explains the ‘ayam purusha’ by ‘man’ in general), and am unable to see in the passage anything more than a crude attempt to account for the fact that a dead body appears swollen and inflated.—­A little further on (section 13) Artabhaga asks what becomes of this man (ayam purusha) when his speech has entered into the fire, his breath into the air, his eye into the sun, &c.  So much here is clear that we have no right to understand by the ‘ayam purusha’ of section 13 anybody different from the ‘ayam purusha’ of the two preceding sections; in spite of this Sa@nkara—­according to whose system the organs of the true sage do not enter into the elements, but are directly merged in Brahman—­explains the ‘ayam purusha’ of section 13 to be the ‘asa/m/yagdar/s/in,’ i.e. the person who has not risen to the cognition of the highest Brahman.  And still a further limiting interpretation is required by the system.  The asa/m/yagdar/s/in also—­who as such has to remain in the sa/m/sara—­cannot do without the organs, since his jiva when passing out of the old body into a new one is invested with the subtle body; hence section 13 cannot be taken as saying what it clearly does say, viz. that at death the different organs pass into the different elements, but as merely indicating that the organs are abandoned by the divinities which, during lifetime, presided over them!