Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/184

Rh it is, venerable Sir.’ ‘Cut it open.’ ‘It is cut open, venerable Sir.’ ‘What seest thou in it?’ ‘Very small seeds, venerable Sir.’ ‘Cut open one of them.’ ‘It is cut open, venerable Sir.’ ‘What seest thou in it?’ ‘Nothing, venerable Sir.’

“Then spake he: ‘That hidden thing, which thou seest not, O gentle youth, from that hidden thing verily has this mighty Nyagrodha tree grown.’

“Believe, O gentle youth, what that hidden thing is, of whose essence is all the world, — that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.

“About a dying man sit his relatives, and ask: ‘Dost thou know me? Dost thou know me?’ So long as his speech does not merge in his mind, his mind in his life, his life in that central glimmer, and this in the highest divinity, so long he knows them.

“But when this has taken place, then he knows them no more.

“What this fine thing is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.”

Our own difficulties in comprehending such passages as this teaching of Shvetaketu come from a failure to see easily at what point and why the allegorical and essentially exoteric cosmology passes over into that subjective idealism upon which the whole doctrine finally depends. Clearer becomes the nature of this doctrine when we compare such a scripture as the teaching of Shvetaketu with those passages, elsewhere in the