an, to be the Self of the embodied soul. For the passage, 'Having
created that he entered into it,' declares the creator, i.e. the
unmodified Brahman, to constitute the Self of the embodied soul, in
consequence of his entering into his products. The following passage
also, 'Entering (into them) with this living Self I will evolve names
and forms' (Ch. Up. VI, 3, 2), in which the highest divinity designates
the living (soul) by the word 'Self,' shows that the embodied Self is
not different from Brahman. Therefore the creative power of Brahman
belongs to the embodied Self also, and the latter, being thus an
independent agent, might be expected to produce only what is beneficial
to itself, and not things of a contrary nature, such as birth, death,
old age, disease, and whatever may be the other meshes of the net of
suffering. For we know that no free person will build a prison for
himself, and take up his abode in it. Nor would a being, itself
absolutely stainless, look on this altogether unclean body as forming
part of its Self. It would, moreover, free itself, according to its
liking, of the consequences of those of its former actions which result
in pain, and would enjoy the consequences of those actions only which
are rewarded by pleasure. Further, it would remember that it had created
this manifold world; for every person who has produced some clearly
appearing effect remembers that he has been the cause of it. And as the
magician easily retracts, whenever he likes, the magical illusion which
he had emitted, so the embodied soul also would be able to reabsorb this
world into itself. The fact is, however, that the embodied soul cannot
reabsorb its own body even. As we therefore see that 'what would be
beneficial is not done,' the hypothesis of the world having proceeded
from an intelligent cause is unacceptable.

22. But the separate (Brahman, i.e. the Brahman separate from the
individual souls) (is the creator); (the existence of which separate
Brahman we learn) from the declaration of difference.

The word 'but' discards the purvapaksha.--We rather declare that that
omniscient, omnipotent Brahman, whose essence is eternal pure cognition
and freedom, and which is additional to, i.e. different from the
embodied Self, is the creative principle of the world. The faults
specified above, such as doing what is not beneficial, and the like, do
not attach to that Brahman; for as eternal freedom is its characteristic
nature,