Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s23.2

v2.c26.s23.2

The doctrine of avidyā with its subjective note suggests a misleading view of the nature of the phenomenal world, that it is an illusion, a creation of the mind. Śaṃkara frequently traces the whole plurality of appearances, including that of Īśvara, to avidyā.⁴ But the nature of Brahman is not affected in any way, simply because our imperfect knowledge takes it to be so. The moon is not duplicated simply because those of defective vision see two moons. “The whole empirical reality, with its names and forms, which can be defined neither as being nor as non-being, rests upon avidyā; while in the sense of highest reality, Being persists without change or transformation. A change resting merely on words can alter nothing in the indivisibility of the real.”¹ When confronted by the difficulties of creation and the finiteness of God, Śaṁkara says: “When by the teaching of non-separateness through sentences like ‘That art thou,’ the consciousness of non-separateness is awakened, then the wanderings of the soul and the creative function of God cease; for the whole tendency of the world to division springs from false knowledge and is removed by perfect knowledge. Whence then the creation? Whence the responsibility for not having brought forth the good only? For saṁsāra, which has as its characteristics the doing of good and evil, is a misconception produced by non-discrimination of the determination caused by avidyā, and consisting in the aggregate of the instruments of activity formed by names and forms; and this misconception, even like the attachment to division and separation by birth and death, does not exist in the absolute sense.”² Again: “By that element of plurality which is the creation of avidyā characterised by name and form, which is evolved as well as non-evolved, which is not to be defined either as existing or non-existing, Brahman becomes the basis of this entire changing world, while in its true real nature it remains unchanged beyond the phenomenal universe.”³ This view, when exclusively emphasised, suggests that there is no plurality at all apart from the individual’s avidyā. All change and motion, all growth and evolution, all science and speculation, are reduced to dreams, shadows and nothing more. The explanation of Brahman’s causality of the world confirms the suspicion. In his anxiety to show that Brahman remains unaffected by the changes of the world,⁴