The System of the Vedanta according to Badarayana's Brahma-Sutras and Cankara's Commentary c7.s7.t3.3

c7.s7.t3.3

(a) The Creator of the World as the Author of Evil.—To the argument that God, as Creator of the world, is responsible for the evil in it, the answer is first made that God, in the creation of creatures, does not act arbitrarily (nirapekṣa), but is bound by a certain regard, namely, the regard for the good and evil works of each creature in an earlier birth (p. 492, 6). By this conception, for which, as we saw before (above p. 267), the world is nothing but the scene of atonement for the works of an earlier existence, the rôle of God as Creator sinks into a secondary, and purely instrumental one. The Body may be compared to a plant (p. 492, 10), which springs up from seed, grows, expands, and finally dies; yet not altogether, but so that something remains,—the seed, which, strewn in the kingdom of Ignorance, brings forth a new plant according to its kind. This seed of man (so far as individual determination is conditioned by it), is his works. In exact correspondence to their moral quality, is the form of the new life, because all happiness and unhappiness depend on it under an inflexible necessity, and also, as we shall see, all virtue and vice of the new existence. In this growth of the present out of the seed of works, the task of the Creator can only be a secondary one: he is to be compared to the rain (the chief condition of growth in India), which causes the plants to shoot. That they grow, is the work of outward circumstances (water, soil, air, light, or, as the Indians say, rain), but what they shall grow to be, does not depend upon those conditions which come from God, but upon the nature of the seed: only rice can come from rice, only barley from barley (p. 492, 9).—This concept requires as its unavoidable consequence, the assumption that *Saṃsāra* is without beginning, for, as far as we go back, each existence draws its conditions from some prior existence (p. 494, 1).—This consequence is as yet absent from the older Upanishads; it contradicts their teaching, certainly intended seriously at first, of the Creation of the world from "the One without a Second" (above p. 230), and of the predestination which necessarily follows (above p. 278) from this. In the desire to do away with this contradiction, we must recognise the real motive of the periodicity of creation, already mentioned above (p. 227) the alternating evolution of the world from, and its re-absorption into Brahman, which is not mentioned in the older Upanishads. Çankara certainly manages to indicate it as already in them, when (p. 495, 1) out of the words: "I will enter into these three divinities with my living Self" (Chând. 6, 3, 2, see above p. 231) he drags the meaning that the "living Self" (the individual soul) must therefore have existed before the creation. But this argument is as little admissible as is his reference to the verse (Rigveda X, 190, 3):