starts from and emphasizes the human self.  This self is Brahman.  The doctrine of Uddalaka[767] takes the other side of the equation:  he starts with Brahman and then asserts that Brahman is the soul.  But though he teaches that in the beginning there was one only without a second, yet he seems to regard the subsequent products of this Being as external to it and permeated by it.  But to Yajnavalkya is ascribed an important modification of these doctrines, namely, that the Atman is unknowable and transcendental.[768] It is unknowable because since it is essentially the knowing subject it can be known only by itself:  it can never become the object of knowledge and language is inadequate to describe it.  All that can be said of it is neti, neti, that is no, no:  it is not anything which we try to predicate of it.  But he who knows that the individual soul is the Atman, becomes Atman; being it, he knows it and knows all the world:  he perceives that in all the world there is no plurality.  Here the later doctrine of Maya is adumbrated, though not formulated.  Any system which holds that in reality there is no plurality or, like some forms of Mahayanist Buddhism, that nothing really exists implies the operation of this Maya or illusion which makes us see the world as it appears to us.  It may be thought of as mere ignorance, as a failure to see the universe as it really is:  but no doubt the later view of Maya as a creative energy which fashions the world of phenomena is closely connected with the half-mythological conceptions found in the Pancaratra and Saiva philosophy which regard this creative illusion as a female force—­a goddess in fact—­inseparably associated with the deity.

The philosophy of the Upanishads, like all religious thought in India, is avowedly a quest of happiness and this happiness is found in some form of union with Brahman.  He is perfect bliss, and whatever is distinct from him is full of suffering.[769] But this sense of the suffering inherent in existence is less marked in the older Upanishads and in the Vedanta than in Buddhism and the Sankhya.  Those systems make it their basis and first principle:  in the Vedanta the temperament is the same but the emphasis and direction of the thought are different.  The Sankhya looks at the world and says that salvation lies in escape into something which has nothing in common with it.  But the Vedantist looks towards Brahman, and his pessimism is merely the feeling that everything which is not wholly and really Brahman is unsatisfactory.  In the later developments of the system, pessimism almost disappears, for the existence of suffering is not the first Truth but an illusion:  the soul, did it but know it, is Brahman and Brahman is bliss.  So far as the Vedanta has any definite practical teaching, it does not wholly despise action.  Action is indeed inferior to knowledge and when knowledge is once obtained works are useless accessories, but the four stages of a Brahman’s career, including household life, are approved in the Vedanta Sutras, though there is a disposition to say that he who has the necessary religious aptitudes can adopt the ascetic life at any time.  The occupations of this ascetic life are meditation and absorption or samadhi, the state in which the meditating soul becomes so completely blended with God on whom it meditates, that it has no consciousness of its separate existence.[770]