nstance, the act of looking at the
sacrificial butter[77]. For if the knowledge of the identity of the Self
and Brahman were understood in the way of combination and the like,
violence would be done thereby to the connection of the words whose
object, in certain passages, it clearly is to intimate the fact of
Brahman and the Self being really identical; so, for instance, in the
following passages, 'That art thou' (Ch. Up. VI, 8, 7); 'I am Brahman'
(B/ri/. Up. I, 4, 10); 'This Self is Brahman' (B/ri/. Up. II, 5, 19).
And other texts which declare that the fruit of the cognition of Brahman
is the cessation of Ignorance would be contradicted thereby; so, for
instance, 'The fetter of the heart is broken, all doubts are solved'
(Mu. Up. II, 2, 8). Nor, finally, would it be possible, in that case,
satisfactorily to explain the passages which speak of the individual
Self becoming Brahman: such as 'He who knows Brahman becomes Brahman'
(Mu. Up. III, 2, 9). Hence the knowledge of the unity of Brahman and the
Self cannot be of the nature of figurative combination and the like. The
knowledge of Brahman does, therefore, not depend on the active energy of
man, but is analogous to the knowledge of those things which are the
objects of perception, inference, and so on, and thus depends on the
object of knowledge only. Of such a Brahman or its knowledge it is
impossible to establish, by reasoning, any connection with actions.

Nor, again, can we connect Brahman with acts by representing it as the
object of the action of knowing. For that it is not such is expressly
declared in two passages, viz. 'It is different from the known and again
above (i.e. different from) the unknown' (Ken. Up. I, 3); and 'How
should he know him by whom he knows all this?' (B/ri/. Up. II, 4, 13.)
In the same way Brahman is expressly declared not to be the object of
the act of devout meditation, viz. in the second half of the verse, Ken.
Up. I, 5, whose first half declares it not to be an object (of speech,
mind, and so on), 'That which is not proclaimed by speech, by which
speech is proclaimed, that only know to be Brahman, not that on which
people devoutly meditate as this.' If it should be objected that if
Brahman is not an object (of speech, mind, &c.) the sastra can
impossibly be its source, we refute this objection by the remark that
the aim of the sastra is to discard all distinctions fictitiously
created by Nescience. The sastra's purport is not to repre