action and passion, but by a sportive impulse:[776] “We see in every-day life,” says Sankara, “that certain doings of princes, who have no desires left unfulfilled, have no reference to any extraneous purpose but proceed from mere sportfulness.  We further see that the process of inhalation and exhalation is going on without reference to any extraneous purpose, merely following the law of its own nature.  Analogously, the activity of the Lord also may be supposed to be mere sport, proceeding from his own nature without reference to any purpose."[777] This is no worse than many other explanations of the scheme of things and the origin of evil but it is not really an explanation.  It means that the Advaita is so engrossed in ecstatic contemplation of the omnipresent Brahman that it pays no attention to a mere by-product like the physical universe.  How or why that universe with all its imperfections comes to exist, it does not explain.

Yet the boldness and ample sweep of Sankara’s thought have in them something greater than logic,[778] something recalling the grandeur of plains and seas limited only by the horizon, nay rather those abysses of space wherein on clear nights worlds and suns innumerable are scattered like sparks by what he would call God’s playfulness.  European thought attains to these altitudes but cannot live in them for long:  it demands and fancies for itself just what Sankara will not grant, the motive of Brahman, the idea that he is working for some consummation, not that he was, is and will be eternally complete, unaffected by the drama of the universe and yet identical with souls that know him.

Even in India the austere and impersonal character of Sankara’s system provoked dissent:  He was accused of being a Buddhist in disguise and the accusation raises an interesting question[779] in the history of Indian philosophy to which I have referred in a previous chapter.  The affinity existing between the Madhyamika form of Buddhist metaphysics and the earlier Vedanta can hardly be disputed and the only question is which borrowed from the other.  Such questions are exceedingly difficult to decide, for from time to time new ideas arose in India, permeated the common intellectual atmosphere, and were worked up by all sects into the forms that suited each best.  In the present instance all that can be said is that certain ideas about the unreality of the world and about absolute and relative truth appear in several treatises both Brahmanic and Buddhist, such as the works of Sankara and Nagarjuna and the Gauda-padakarikas, and of these the works attributed to Nagarjuna seem to be the oldest.  It must also be remembered that according to Chinese accounts Bodhidharma preached at Nanking in 520 a doctrine very similar to the advaita of Sankara though expressed in Buddhist phraseology.