A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s3.4

c33.s3.4

The doctrine of Bādarāyaṇa evidently directed itself strongly against the Sāṁkhya system and the atomism of the Vaiçeṣikas, but its miserable presentation in catchwords leaves us guessing at its meaning. What does seem clear is that Bādarāyaṇa was not a believer in the illusion doctrine of Çaṅkara's school, that he held that individual souls, if derived from the absolute, remained distinct from it and real, and that matter derived also from the absolute had a distinct reality of its own. But this, though probable, cannot be proved because we cannot now recover the verbal explanations which originally accompanied the text, but which were never written down, and so permitted the rise of different interpretations.