Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/90

72 monistic school cannot fail to command our admiration. Sawkara makes no concessions of any kind. He begins and never parts with his conviction that whatever is, is one and the same in itself, without variableness or shadow of turning. This, what he calls the Brahman, does not possess any qualities (viresha), not even those of being and thinking, but it is both being and thought. To every attempt to define or qualify Brahman, *Sazkara has but one answer No, No ! When the question is asked as to the cause of what cannot be denied, namely, the manifold phenomenal world, or the world as reflected in our consciousness, with all its individual subjects, and all its individual objects, all that 6a#zkara condescends to say is that their cause is Avidy or Nescience. Here lies what strikes a Western mind as the vulnerable point of ^awkara's Veddnta-philo- sophy. We should feel inclined to say that even this Avidy, which causes the phenomenal world to appear, must itself have some cause and reality, but Sa#zkara does not allow this, and repeats again and again that, as an illusion, Nescience is neither real nor unreal, but is some- thing exactly like our own ignorance when, for instance, we imagine we see a serpent, while what we really see is a rope, and yet we run away from it in all earnestness as if it were a real cobra. This creative Nescience once granted, everything else proceeds smoothly enough. Brah- man (or Atman), as held or as beheld by Avidy, seems modified into all that is phenomenal. Our instruments of knowledge, whether senses or mind, nay, our whole body, should be considered as impediments or fetters rather, as