Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/136

Rh 120 V E D V E D thing in this and in future spheres of fruition. He must become a snnnydsin. In the words of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad : They that know the breath of the breath, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the thought of the thought, they have seen this fontal spirit, primeval, existing from before all time. It is to be seen with the intellect only. In it there is nought that is manifold. From death to death he goes that looks on this as manifold. It is to be seen in one way only. It is unthinkable, imperishable, un sullied, beyond illusion. Unborn, infinite, imperishable, is Self. Let the patient Brahman know that and learn wisdom. Let him not learn many words, for that is a weariness of the voice. This indeed is the great, Unborn Self. This it is that holy mendicants yearn after in setting out upon their wandering life. Yearning after this it was that the ancient sages desired no offspring, saying, What have we to do with children, we to whom this spiritual reality belongs in the real sphere ? They arose, and forsook the desire of children, of wealth, and of worldly existence, and set out as holy mendicants. &quot; The tardy aspirant, mandddhikdrin, who seeks for gradual emancipation, kramamukti, is enjoined to mutter and to ponder incessantly upon the mystic syllable Om. This is said to be the nearest image of Brahman, to be identical with all words, and with all things. &quot; They make mistake who leave me out, Me, when they fly, I am the wings ; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahman sings.&quot; The spiritual preceptor proceeds by the way of &quot;illusory supsr- position, and the sublation of that superposition,&quot; adhydropdpavd- danydyena. Illusory superposition is the viewing of the unreal, the fictitious series of souls and their environments, upon the one and only real. The sublation of this superposition is the position of the impersonal self, Brahman, as the sole reality, and the recogni tion of the falsity of the fictitious illusion and of all its figments. The doctrine of sublation is expounded as follows in Nrisinhasaras- vati s Subodhini : Sublation is the annulment of the series pro ceeding from illusion. The states in this series are illusory emana tions, vivartta, of Brahman, and to annul them is to abide as pure, undifferenced spirit. The apparent snake of the familiar example, seen by the belated wayfarer, illusorily proceeds from, or is fic titiously produced upon, the piece of rope, without any change of nature taking place in the rope itself. It is sublated when the piece of rope resumes its proper shape. A thing may retain its own nature, and become otherwise than it was, in two manners, viz., by modification, parindnm, and by illusory emanation, vi vartta. Modification is when a thing really quits its proper form and takes another shape. Milk, for example, quits its proper form to take the form of curds and whey. Illusory emanation is where a thing, without quitting its proper form, takes another and a fic titious shape. The piece of rope takes the fictitious appearance of a snake without quitting its proper form : it remains a piece of rope. The transmigratory series is not allowed in the Vedanta to be a modification of Brahman. Brahman, if modified as the milk is modified, would be mutable, and therefore perishable. The doc trine of illusory emanation is not exposed to this difficulty. The series superposed on Brahman being fictitious, Brahman remains unchanged. A fictitious thing, then, is said to be sublated when only the real thing abides upon which it was imposed. The trans- migratory series is sublated when only the pure intelligence re mains upon which it was fictitiously outspread.&quot; By continuous contemplation the aspirant refunds each entity into the entity from which it emanated, till he passes beyond illu sion to the fontal unity of undifferenced spiritual existence. He follows the order of dissolution, the inverse of the order of evolution, till he arrives at Brahman. He thus realizes the import of the great text, the mahdvdkya, &quot;that art thou,&quot; tat tvam asi (Chhan- dogya Upanishad, sixth Prapathaka). Particular souls are one with the universal soul, the Demiurgus, and the universal soul is one with Brahman. This knowledge is the last and highest of cog nitions, the final modification of the aspirant s intellect as it melts away into the fontal unity. This is the phalitam brahma, &quot; the resultant impersonal self.&quot; The phalitam brahma is a modification of the aspirant s sensorium, his antahkarana, and passes away, that the impersonal self, the supreme spirit, may alone remain. He to whose inner faculties this vision is present has the spiritual intuition, samyagdarsana. He is extricated but alive, jivanmukta, and re mains in the body till those merits are exhausted which have led to his present life. Disengaged from metempsychosis, and still in the body, the perfected sage is said to be untouched by merit and demerit, unsoiled by sin, uninjured by anything he does or leaves undone. No evil, the scholiasts say, arises from this freedom, as the purificatory virtues of the aspirant cling to the accomplished seer, his humility, his sincerity, his tenderness to all, remaining upon him like ornaments even after the rise of the spiritual intui tion. Finally his body falls away, and his spirit is freed for ever. It abides in itself. It is undifferenced existence, undifferenced intelligence, undifferenced beatitude. This is the consummation of brahmavidyd. The soul has found itself, has loosed itself, not that in verity it is ever loosed or bound. From the highest point of view bondage and liberation, implication and extrication, are unreal. The Vedantins compare the individual spirit seeking to regain its im personal nature to one searching for that which he unwittingly carries about with him, to a man trembling at his own shadow. The soul of the finished sage knows itself, and therefore is itself. In the words of the Mundaka Upanishad : &quot;Burst are his heart s ties, broken his doubts, his merits spent, when he has seen the principle supreme at once and not supreme. In the golden, perfect involucrum is the unsullied Self, without parts, luminous, which they know that know the soul.&quot; &quot;As all rivers flowing onwards disappear in the sea, quitting name and form, so the sage extricated from name and form enters into the self-luminous spirit beyond the last of things, beyond illusion.&quot; In the words of the Brihadar anyaka : &quot;He that knows it is no longer sullied by evil deeds. Repressing his senses, quiescent, free from all desires, ready to suffer all things, his thoughts fixed, he sees within himself the Self, the universal soul. Imperfection reaches him no more ; he passes beyond imperfection. He burns up all his imperfection. He that knows Brahman becomes free from imperfection, free from uncertainty, insphered in Brahman. This same great, unborn, Self is undecaying, undying, imperishable, beyond all fear. Brah man is beyond all fear. He that knows this becomes the spiritual reality beyond all fear.&quot; (A. E. G. ) VEDAS. See BRAHMANISM and SANSKRIT LITERATURE. VEDDAHS, or WEDDAHS, that is, &quot;Hunters,&quot; a primi tive people of Ceylon, probably representing the Yakkos of Sanskrit writers, who appear to have been the true aborigines and the sole inhabitants of the island prior to the Hindu conquest. During the Dutch occupation (1644- 1796) they were met in scattered groups as far north as Jaffna, but are now confined to the south-eastern district, about the wooded Bintenne, Badulla, and Nilgala Hills, and thence to the coast near Batticaloa. They constitute three distinct social groups the coast people, who are settled and partly civilized, freely intermingling with their Singhalese neighbours ; the wild or rock people, who keep entirely aloof, living exclusively on the produce of the chase; and the village people, semi-nomad agriculturists, intermediate in every respect between the other two. The Veddahs are thus in a state of transition from the lowest to a relatively high degree of culture ; and their physical appearance gives evidence of their intermediate position between the aboriginal and the intruding races of Ceylon. Virchow 1 finds (1) that the Veddahs and Singhalese have much in common, which is probably due to the inter mingling of the aborigines with the Hindu immigrants, as is also suggested by historic and anthropological considera tions ; (2) that both differ very decidedly from the Tamils of north Ceylon and south India ; (3) that the Veddahs show certain analogies with the small dark pre-Draviclian element in this region, which De Quatrefages calls &quot;Ne grito,&quot; and which Huxley groups with his &quot;Australoid&quot; division of mankind. The true Veddahs of Bintenne are almost a dwarfish race, averaging about 5 feet (men, 5 feet 2 inches ; women, 4 feet 10 inches), with correspondingly low cranial capacity, narrow high skull like the Papuan (index 70), mesognathous jaw, slightly prominent cheek bones, straight, but shaggy rather than lank, black hair, and features altogether more Hindu than Negroid, although of somewhat darker complexion than the ordinary olive- brown Singhalese. They wander about in small family groups, which have not reached the tribal state, being absolutely destitute of any political or communal organi zation whatsoever. Their dwellings are the caves of the rocks or the forest trees ; they clothe themselves with foliage ; and they devour uncooked vermin, reptiles, and whatever other quarry they are able to capture with their rude weapons. It is stated that they can neither count, mark the succession of time, nor distinguish colours ; but what is more certain is that they never laugh, in this respect differing from nearly all other races. They also 1 Ueber die Wcddas von Ceylon und ihre Beziehungen zu den Nach- barstammen, Berlin, 1882.