Page:The Vedanta-sutras, with the Sri-bhashya of Ramanujacharya.djvu/75

 Iviii ANALYTICAL OUTLINE OF CONTENTS.

attributeless character frees Him from such an association, it frees Him also from His association with all that is good and auspicious, and indeed makes all things unreal so that there remains nothing that is to be known through know- ing the Brahman. The proposition that, by knowing a certain single thing, all things become known, does not surely denote that all things are unreal. Against cannot be held that the unreality of all things is due to the fact of their being modifications of the one real thing which is attributeless intelligence. Theattributelessnessofthe.5ra#- man is itself contradicted by the scripture ; and in the equa- tion ' That thou art ' neither the That nor the thou can denote an attributeless thing, unless indeed both these words are interpreted figuratively (pp. 358-366.). This difficulty of having to interpret both the words in a gram- matical equation figuratively cannot be got over by main- taining that the purpose of a grammatical equation is not at all to denote any attributes, but is merely to denote the oneness of the thing referred to therein ; because the func- tion of a grammatical equation is to predicate in relation to a thing, either affirmatively or negatively, by means of certain words that that same thing, which has already a particular form denoted by some words, is also possessed of a certain other form. Only when one of the two attri- butes mentioned in a grammatical equation contradicts the other, is it right to interpret figuratively either of the two words denoting those attributes, in as much as the gram- matical equation has to denote only one thing as character- ised by two consistent attributes. Nor again can it be maintained that the words of a grammatical equation can- not import oneness in relation to the things they denote, on the ground that the thing correlated to any one attribute is distinct from the thing which is correlated to any other attri-