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Outline of the Vedanta system of philosophy according to Shankara
Outline of the Vedanta system of philosophy according to Shankara Author:Paul Deussen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3. No less the fundamental assumption of the Vedanta system contradicts the canon of the Vedic ritual: this indeed assumes a survival7 of the self be- Cont... more »radiction of the yond the body; but it also presupposes a multiplicity of individual souls discrete from Brahman. These souls, engaged in an endless round-of-rebirth,8 enter one body after another, the deeds9 done in each life necessarily determining the succeeding life and its quality. 4. Experience, as it is the result of our perceptive and cognitive faculties,10 and the Vedic ritual as well, with its commands and prohibitions, its promises Ignorance and and threats, both rest on a false cogni- kmmiujje tion,11 an innate illusion,12 called avidyd or ignorance, the assertions of which, like apparitions in a dream, are true only till one awakes. On closer inquiry this innate avidyd is found to consist in the fact that the atman, that is, the soul, the self, is not able to distinguish itself from the upddhis or limiting conditions with which it is invested. These limiting conditions include the body, the physical organs, and the deeds; and only a part of them, namely, the body, is destroyed at death, the rest accompanying the soul in its transmigrations. The converse of this avidyd is knowledge (vidyd also called right cognition or universal 7 Vyatireka. 8 Sariisara. 9 Karman. 10 Pramana, including immediate apprehension (pratyaska), inference (anumana), and so forth. n Mithya-jnana. l2Bhranti. chapter{Section 4cognition,13 by virtue of which the atman distinguishes himself from the npadhis, and recognizes that the latter, resting on avidya, are mere illusion14 or erroneous assumption,16 whereas he himself is identical with the one and only one, the all-embracing Brahman. 5. Universal cognit...« less