those which ascribe to it personal attributes, Sa@nkara
is right in giving preference to texts of the former
kind. The Brahman of the old Upanishads, from
which the souls spring to enjoy individual consciousness
in their waking state, and into which they sink back
temporarily in the state of deep dreamless sleep and
permanently in death, is certainly not represented
adequately by the strictly personal I/s/vara of Ramanuja,
who rules the world in wisdom and mercy. The older
Upanishads, at any rate, lay very little stress upon
personal attributes of their highest being, and hence
Sa@nkara is right in so far as he assigns to
his hypostatised personal I/s/vara[29] a lower place
than to his absolute Brahman. That he also faithfully
represents the prevailing spirit of the Upanishads
in his theory of the ultimate fate of the soul, we
have already remarked above. And although the
Maya doctrine cannot, in my opinion, be said to form
part of the teaching of the Upanishads, it cannot
yet be asserted to contradict it openly, because the
very point which it is meant to elucidate, viz.
the mode in which the physical universe and the multiplicity
of individual souls originate, is left by the Upanishads
very much in the dark. The later growth of the
Maya doctrine on the basis of the Upanishads is therefore
quite intelligible, and I fully agree with Mr. Gough
when he says regarding it that there has been no addition
to the system from without but only a development
from within, no graft but only growth. The lines
of thought which finally led to the elaboration of
the full-blown Maya theory may be traced with considerable
certainty. In the first place, deepening speculation
on Brahman tended to the notion of advaita being taken
in a more and more strict sense, as implying not only
the exclusion of any second principle external to
Brahman, but also the absence of any elements of duality
or plurality in the nature of the one universal being
itself; a tendency agreeing with the spirit of a certain
set of texts from the Upanishads. And as the
fact of the appearance of a manifold world cannot
be denied, the only way open to thoroughly consistent
speculation was to deny at any rate its reality, and
to call it a mere illusion due to an unreal principle,
with which Brahman is indeed associated, but which
is unable to break the unity of Brahman’s nature
just on account of its own unreality. And, in
the second place, a more thorough following out of
the conception that the union with Brahman is to be
reached through true knowledge only, not unnaturally
led to the conclusion that what separates us in our
unenlightened state from Brahman is such as to allow
itself to be completely sublated by an act of knowledge;
is, in other words, nothing else but an erroneous
notion, an illusion.—A further circumstance
which may not impossibly have co-operated to further
the development of the theory of the world’s
unreality will be referred to later on.[30]