Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/125

Rh and the author of Vedanta, vedavid veddntakrit; the Lord is the one object of knowledge in all the Vedas, sarvaw vedair aham eva vedyah, a language which implies that the word Veda means the book of knowledge and that these Scriptures deserve their appellation. The Purushottama from his high supremacy above the Immutable and the mutable has extended himself - in the world and in the Veda. Still the letter of the Scripture binds and confuses, as the apostle of Chris- tianity warned his disciples when he said that the letter killeth and it is the spirit that saves ;and thereisa point beyond which the utility of the Scripture itself ceases. The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; “I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge”, says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self- luminous Reality, it is shabdabrahma : the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from _the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadandd v'itasya, guhdydm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, ndnyad astits vddinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you