Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3.3

c7.s1.t3.3

When thought, liberal to itself, had laden the idea of the Âtman with all attributes of every perfection, of absolute unity, of unlimited fulness, the world of plurality, measured by the standard of the everlasting One, must have necessarily appeared a state of disruption, restriction and pain. The unconstrained feeling of being at home in this world is destroyed at one stroke, as soon as thought has weighed it against its ideal of the supreme One, and found it wanting, and thus the glorification of the Âtman becomes involuntarily an ever increasingly bitter criticism of this world. If the Âtman be commended "who is far above hunger and thirst, above sorrow and confusion, above old age and death," who is there who does not detect in such words a reflection, though it be not openly expressed, on the world of the creature, in which hunger and thirst, sorrow and confusion are at home, and in which men grow old and die? "The unseen seer," thus Yâjnavalkya speaks to Uddâlaka, "the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower; there is no other seer, no other hearer, no other thinker, no other knower. That is thy Âtman, the mover within, the immortal; whatever is besides him, is full of sorrow.”—And it is said on another occasion: “as the sun, the eye of the universe, remains far off and unaffected by all sickness that meets the (human) eye, so also the One, the Âtman, who dwells in all creatures, dwells afar and untouched by the sorrows of the world.” Here occurs for the first time the expression “Sorrow of the world.” That the One, the happy Âtman, has chosen to manifest himself in the world of plurality, of becoming and decease, was a misfortune: this is not openly stated, for men are shy of a thought, which would trace to the happy One Being the roots of the sorrow of earth or even any fault, but they cannot have been very far from this thought when they proposed to man as the highest aim of his effort, the undoing in his case of this manifestation, and the finding for himself a return from the plurality to the One.