The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s2.t3.1

c12.s2.t3.1

Emancipation is not to be regarded as a becoming something which previously had no existence. In the first place, because in the sphere of metaphysical phenomena to which emancipation belongs there is in general no becoming but only a being (as all metaphysical thinkers, not only in India but in the West also, from Parmenides and Plato down to Kant and Schopenhauer, have recognised). The law of causation rules without exception everything that is finite, but nothing that lies outside and beyond, or like emancipation leads beyond. But for a further reason also emancipation cannot be a coming into being of that which did not previously exist, since it could not then be *summum bonum*. For everything that comes to be is transient; that which from nothingness became something may also return back from being something into its nothingness. What the wave threw up it may sweep away again ; τὸ μηδὲν εἰς οὐδὲν ῥέπει.