Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19.18

v2.c26.s19.18

While the saguṇa Brahman changes, it is maintained that it still remains within its constitutive idea, so that the alterations are all in the accidents and not in the essentials. Īśvara's oneness is not impaired by self-expression in the many.⁴ “As the magician is not affected by the māyā which has himself created, since it is unreal, so also the Supreme is not affected by the māyā of saṃsāra.”⁵ Thus Śaṃkara attempts to combine the ideas of the negation of the finite and the presupposition of the finite in his conception of Īśvara. The charge against Spinoza that he reduces the Absolute to a mere blank of indeterminate being, which he inconsistently transforms into the self-determining God, has no force against Śaṃkara, who commits no such sublime inconsequence. He is clearly conscious that the negation of all the determinations of the finite can give us only an abstract being of which nothing can be said except that it is. So long as we are employing the methods of logic, the highest reality is not the indeterminate Brahman but determinate Īśvara, who is the source of all the manifold changes of the universe. But there is throughout Śaṁkara’s philosophy the pervading prejudice against the adequacy of logic and the finality of its ideal, and so we find that this conception of saguṇa Brahman, or concrete spirit, is, according to him, so riddled with self-contradictions and inconsistencies that it cannot be regarded as the highest reality.