Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t2.22

c7.s1.t2.22

It is clear that those three oldest existents, those original creations of the Âtman, in which he then reveals name and form by his breath of life, are treated before this act of revealing as a chaotic something, which is there, but is not as yet anything precisely determinate, older than the world of things we see, and not eternal like the Âtman, but the Âtman’s first creation. But these attempts to demonstrate what in things is matter, bear very perceptibly the marks of immaturity. One would expect to find in the chaos, before the breath of life of the demiurgus produces in it “name and form,” a nameless and formless, an absolute, indeterminate something, and yet it is in the very beginning organic, of the threefold nature, of fire, water, and food, and thus it has thereby originally in itself an element of distinctness and nomination. And similarly, on the other hand, is the Âtman, the creator and vivifier of the chaotic, less firmly maintained in that paramount position resulting from the abstraction which we found attained in the farewell discourse of Yâjnavalkya. It is not the simple One, from whose nature, for his unity’s sake, all reflection and projection must be excluded, as involving the duality of subject and object; he thinks, and this, indeed, is his thought: may I become a plurality. Those thinkers who have pursued the idea of the unity in the nature of the Âtman to its ultimate consequence, would scarcely have ventured to attempt, in the way entered upon here, a solution of the problem of matter and its evolution from the Âtman; it is surely no mere accident that those passages in our texts also, which accentuate those consequences with the most marked emphasis, are silent on these problems: men may have felt that thought had here reached a chasm, over which to throw a bridge was not in their power.