Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c9.80

c9.80

¹ Max Müller [*Ancient Sanskrit Literature*, p. 560], says: " 'That One,' the poet says, 'breathed, and lived'; it enjoyed more than mere existence; yet its life was not dependent on anything else, as our life depends on the air which we breathe. It breathed breathless.' Language blushes at such expressions, but her blush is a blush of triumph. "After this the poet plunges into imagery. 'Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled in gloom profound, as ocean without light.' No one has ever found a truer expression of the Infinite, breathing and heaving within Itself, than the ocean in a dark night, without a star, without a torch. . . . "But now this one had to be represented as growing—as entering into reality. . . As yet, the real world existed only as a germ, hidden in a husky shell; now the poet represents the one substance as borne into life by its own innate heat (*tapas*). . . The question how there was generation in nature was still unanswered. A miracle had to be appealed to: this miracle was Love. 'Then first came Love upon it,' the poet says; a power which arises from the unsearchable depths of our nature, making us feel our own incompleteness, and drawing us, half-conscious, half-unconscious, towards that far-off and desired something, through which alone our life seems to become a reality. . . The One Being which the poet had postulated was neither self-sufficient nor dead: a desire fell upon it—a spring of life, manifested in growth of every kind. . . Here, then, the poet imagines he has discovered the secret of creation—the transition of the nothing into the something—the change of the abstract into the concrete. Love was to him the beginning of real reality, and he appeals to the wise of old, who discovered in Love 'the bond between created things and uncreated'."