/vara is known to the
Upanishads; but we must now admit that if, for the purpose of
determining the nature of the highest being, a choice has to be made
between those texts which represent Brahman as nirgu/n/a, and those
which ascribe to it personal attributes, /S/a@nkara is right in giving
preference to texts of the former kind. The Brahman of the old
Upanishads, from which the souls spring to enjoy individual
consciousness in their waking state, and into which they sink back
temporarily in the state of deep dreamless sleep and permanently in
death, is certainly not represented adequately by the strictly personal
I/s/vara of Ramanuja, who rules the world in wisdom and mercy. The older
Upanishads, at any rate, lay very little stress upon personal attributes
of their highest being, and hence /S/a@nkara is right in so far as he
assigns to his hypostatised personal I/s/vara[29] a lower place than to
his absolute Brahman. That he also faithfully represents the prevailing
spirit of the Upanishads in his theory of the ultimate fate of the soul,
we have already remarked above. And although the Maya doctrine cannot,
in my opinion, be said to form part of the teaching of the Upanishads,
it cannot yet be asserted to contradict it openly, because the very
point which it is meant to elucidate, viz. the mode in which the
physical universe and the multiplicity of individual souls originate, is
left by the Upanishads very much in the dark. The later growth of the
Maya doctrine on the basis of the Upanishads is therefore quite
intelligible, and I fully agree with Mr. Gough when he says regarding it
that there has been no addition to the system from without but only a
development from within, no graft but only growth. The lines of thought
which finally led to the elaboration of the full-blown Maya theory may
be traced with considerable certainty. In the first place, deepening
speculation on Brahman tended to the notion of advaita being taken in a
more and more strict sense, as implying not only the exclusion of any
second principle external to Brahman, but also the absence of any
elements of duality or plurality in the nature of the one universal
being itself; a tendency agreeing with the spirit of a certain set of
texts from the Upanishads. And as the fact of the appearance of a
manifold world cannot be denied, the only way open to thoroughly
consistent speculation was to deny at any rate its reality, and to call
it a mere illusion due