Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government c2.s1.32

c2.s1.32

¹⁵ Just as in ŚB. IV. 1. 4. 3 “whatever the Regnum does (*yád dha kím ca . . . kárma cakré*) unquickened (*áprasūtam*) by the Sacerdotium, therein it fails” (*na . . . sámānṛdhe*) or conversely “succeeds” (*ānṛdhe*). We see from this collation that *kṛta* and *saṃṛddha*, *akṛta* and *asaṃṛddha* are equivalents: that what is “misdone” is really “not done” at all. Thus the privative *a* in *akṛta* does not deny an event, but asserts that the “event” was not an act but a failure to “act.” The verb “to act” has strictly speaking only a good and positive sense, as when we speak of God as “all in act”; a sin is not an “act” but an “omission.” St. Thomas Aquinas in the same way speaks of the sinner as “non-existent” (*Sum. Theol.*, I. 20. 2 *ad* 4), not meaning to say that no one sins. In the same way, too, *asat*, literally “not being,” is also in many contexts “naught-y,” i. e. evil; not a mere nothingness, but a mere potentiality. All these propositions depend on the principle *ens et bonum convertuntur*, common to all traditional metaphysics. In BG. XVII. 27-28 *sat* and *asat* are in all cases categories of what the Nominalist would call “real” things. In JUB. I. 53. 1 the two worlds—Sky and Earth, with all their equivalents, m. and f.—are respectively *sat* and *asat*. remarkable that in discussing this very question of the reality of the world Sextus Empiricus makes use of the familiar Indian parable of the snake and the rope, saying that the Sceptics by no means “abolish phenomena” but only “question whether the underlying object is such as it appears . . . our doubt does not concern the appearance itself but the account given of the appearance” (*Pyrrhonism*, I. 227-228). So also Heracleitus (*Aph*. IV and XIII taken together). This is precisely the Vedantic position: the rope is not a snake, nor even “really” a rope, but “really” a manifestation of Brahma, “the Real who becomes whatever there is here” (TU. II. 6). In the same way, as we have repeatedly pointed out, *māyā* does not mean an “illusion” as distinct from a real phenomenon, but rather the means of creating any appearance whatever: that these worlds are *māyāmaya* does not mean that they do not “exist,” but that they are quantitative, or “material” in the sense of the etymologically equivalent *mātrā*, “measure,” to be understood in the sense of Heracleitus XX, “ever-living Fire, in measures (μέτρα) being kindled and in measures going out” (ἀποσβεννύμενον = *nirvāta*, as applicable to fire, wind and passion); to these “measures” of Heracleitus (cf. Plato, *Timaeus* 45B, C, where vision is a part of the internal fire) correspond the *tejomātrāḥ* of BU. IV. 4. 1 = *prāṇāgnayaḥ* of Praśna U. IV. 3, i. e. the human elementals or “powers of the soul.” For *māyā*, from √*mā* and as denoting the principle of measurement and thus the means of creation see “Nirmāṇakāya” in *JRAS* 1938, pp. 81-84, and AV. XIII. 2. 3 and 5, *nánārūpe áhanī kárṣi māyáyā . . . dīvaṁ ca sūrya pṛthivīṁ ca devīm ahorātré vimīmāno yád éṣi*.