Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s19.23

v2.c26.s19.23

Śaṃkara believes that the aim of the scriptural accounts of creation is to establish the identity of Brahman and the world.¹ If the world were not identical with God, and if he created it as a substance separate from himself, then he would be guilty of the charge of making efforts under the influence of motives. In other words, he is no God at all.² If he acts in obedience to the law of karma, then he is limited by it. We have referred to Fichte’s conception of the self which comes to self-consciousness by breaking itself, so to speak, against some obstacle and by being reflected back, as it were, upon itself from this obstacle. Such a self is really dependent on its other, of which it is said to be the source and support. The self cannot precede the world nor can it survive it. If we succeed in abolishing the not-self, we at the same time succeed in abolishing the self. When Fichte becomes vaguely aware of these consequences, he rises to the conception of a reality which is “neither subject nor object but the ground of both.” Śaṃkara recognises most clearly what Fichte was groping after, that subject and object are distinctions of logic which have no meaning when we speak of the source of all logic. The Absolute is neither the bearer of knowledge nor the object of knowledge, but knowledge itself (jñānam). If the whole world is regarded as an objectification of the thought of God, existing in order that he might perpetually maintain himself as self-conscious of the world as an object, then such a God is only relative and not absolute;³ for “The Absolute does not want to make eyes at itself in a mirror or like a squirrel in a cage, to revolve the circle of its own perfections.”⁴ In short, personality is not the ultimate category of the universe. Plotinus observes: “All that has self-consciousness and self-intellection is derivative.”⁵ So beyond the personal Īśvara is Brahman the Absolute, lifted above all self-divisions and holding together both absolute objectivity and subjectivity in the unbreakable bond of absolute consciousness.