The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s7.t3.9

v2.c40.s7.t3.9

It is important to note the real similarity between the self in the view of the Yājñavalkya of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and that of the Sāṁkhya; both are absolutely without quality or activity, completely inactive, the capacity of knowing without content; both, we may fairly say, represent bare abstractions which could never as such be real. If the self of Yājñavalkya is wholly apart from empirical existence and knowledge, the same thing really applies to the spirit of the Sāṁkhya, for it is not really in contact with matter. In the Buddhism of the Sarvāstivādins³ we find the same view of Vijñāna, which remains wholly apart from real connexion with the object, being, like it, merely a momentary flashing wholly transitory and uncaused. Naturally in all three cases some effort must be made to explain the connexion of this subjectivity and the object which makes its potentiality concrete knowledge, and equally naturally at this point in all three systems we have a lacuna, which is filled up by unintelligible assertions, the Buddhists resorting to a relation of Sārūpya, ‘co-ordination’ or ‘co-relation’, which is found also in the Yogabhāṣya¹ of Vyāsa as the mode of bridging over the gulf between knower and knowledge.