sense.  They are appearances, phenomena.  This universe of phenomena includes not only all our emotions and all our perceptions of the external world, but also what might be supposed to be the deepest truths of religion, such as the personality of the Creator and the wanderings of the soul in the maze of transmigration.  In the same sense that we suffer pain and pleasure, it is true that there is a personal God (Isvara) who emits and reabsorbs the world at regular intervals, and that the soul is a limited existence passing from body to body.  In this sense the soul, as in the Sankhya philosophy, is surrounded by the upadhis, certain limiting conditions or disguises, which form a permanent psychical equipment with which it remains invested in all its innumerable bodies.  But though these doctrines may be true for those who are in the world, for those souls who are agents, enjoyers and sufferers, they cease to be true for the soul which takes the path of knowledge and sees its own identity with Brahman.  It is by this means only that emancipation is attained, for good works bring a reward in kind, and hence inevitably lead to new embodiments, new creations of Maya.  And even in knowledge we must distinguish between the knowledge of the lower Brahman or personal Deity (Isvara) and of the higher indescribable Brahman.[775] For the orthodox Hindu this distinction is of great importance, for it enables him to reconcile passages in the scriptures which otherwise are contradictory.  Worship and meditation which make Isvara their object do not lead directly to emancipation.  They lead to the heavenly world of Isvara, in which the soul, though glorified, is still a separate individual existence.  But for him who meditates on the Highest Brahman and knows that his true self is that Brahman, Maya and its works cease to exist.  When he dies nothing differentiates him from that Brahman who alone is bliss and no new individual existence arises.

The crux of this doctrine is in the theory of Maya.  If Maya appertains to Brahman, if it exists by his will, then why is it an evil, why is release to be desired?  Ought not the individual souls to serve Brahman’s purpose, and would not it be better served by living gladly in the phenomenal world than by passing beyond it?  But such an idea has rarely satisfied Indian thinkers.  If, on the other hand, Maya is an evil or at least an imperfection, if it is like rust on a blade or dimness in a mirror, if, so to speak, the edges of Brahman are weak and break into fragments which are prevented by their own feebleness from realizing the unity of the whole, then the mind wonders uneasily if, in spite of all assurances to the contrary, this does not imply that Brahman is subject to some external law, to some even more mysterious Beyond.  But Sankara and the Brahma-sutras will not tolerate such doubts.  According to them, Brahman in making the world is not actuated by a motive in the ordinary sense, for that would imply human