water; for death is fire. The colloquy
then turns to what we must consider an altogether new topic, Artabhaga
asking, 'When this man (ayam purusha) dies, do the vital spirits depart
from him or not?' and Yajnavalkya answering, 'No, they are gathered up
in him; he swells, he is inflated; inflated the dead (body) is
lying.'--Now this is for /S/a@nkara an important passage, as we have
already seen above (p. lxxxi); for he employs it, in his comment on
Ved.-sutra IV, 2, 13, for the purpose of proving that the passage B/ri/.
Up. IV, 4, 6 really means that the vital spirits do not, at the moment
of death, depart from the true sage. Hence the present passage also must
refer to him who possesses the highest knowledge; hence the 'ayam
purusha' must be 'that man,' i.e. the man who possesses the highest
knowledge, and the highest knowledge then must be found in the preceding
clause which says that death itself may be conquered by water. But, as
Ramanuja also remarks, neither does the context favour the assumption
that the highest knowledge is referred to, nor do the words of section
11 contain any indication that what is meant is the merging of the Self
of the true Sage in Brahman. With the interpretation given by Ramanuja
himself, viz. that the pra/n/as do not depart from the jiva of the dying
man, but accompany it into a new body, I can agree as little (although
he no doubt rightly explains the 'ayam purusha' by 'man' in general),
and am unable to see in the passage anything more than a crude attempt
to account for the fact that a dead body appears swollen and
inflated.--A little further on (section 13) Artabhaga asks what becomes
of this man (ayam purusha) when his speech has entered into the fire,
his breath into the air, his eye into the sun, &c. So much here is clear
that we have no right to understand by the 'ayam purusha' of section 13
anybody different from the 'ayam purusha' of the two preceding sections;
in spite of this /S/a@nkara--according to whose system the organs of the
true sage do not enter into the elements, but are directly merged in
Brahman--explains the 'ayam purusha' of section 13 to be the
'asa/m/yagdar/s/in,' i.e. the person who has not risen to the cognition
of the highest Brahman. And still a further limiting interpretation is
required by the system. The asa/m/yagdar/s/in also--who as such has to
remain in the sa/m/sara--cannot do without the organs, since his jiva
when passing out of the old body into a