n the highest Person,' &c.--Here the doubt
presents itself, whether the object of meditation referred to in the
latter passage is the highest Brahman or the other Brahman; a doubt
based on the former passage, according to which both are under
discussion.

The purvapakshin maintains that the other, i.e. the lower Brahman, is
referred to, because the text promises only a reward limited by a
certain locality for him who knows it. For, as the highest Brahman is
omnipresent, it would be inappropriate to assume that he who knows it
obtains a fruit limited by a certain locality. The objection that, if
the lower Brahman were understood, there would be no room for the
qualification, 'the highest person,' is not valid, because the vital
principal (pra/n/a) may be called 'higher' with reference to the
body[175].

To this we make the following reply: What is here taught as the object
of meditation is the highest Brahman only.--Why?--On account of its
being spoken of as the object of sight. For the person to be meditated
upon is, in a complementary passage, spoken of as the object of the act
of seeing, 'He sees the person dwelling in the castle (of the body;
purusham puri/s/ayam), higher than that one who is of the shape of the
individual soul, and who is himself higher (than the senses and their
objects).' Now, of an act of meditation an unreal thing also can be the
object, as, for instance, the merely imaginary object of a wish. But of
the act of seeing, real things only are the objects, as we know from
experience; we therefore conclude, that in the passage last quoted, the
highest (only real) Self which corresponds to the mental act of complete
intuition[176] is spoken of as the object of sight. This same highest
Self we recognise in the passage under discussion as the object of
meditation, in consequence of the term, 'the highest person.'--But--an
objection will be raised--as the object of meditation we have the
highest person, and as the object of sight the person higher than that
one who is himself higher, &c.; how, then, are we to know that those two
are identical?--The two passages, we reply, have in common the terms
'highest' (or 'higher,' para) and 'person.' And it must not by any means
be supposed that the term jivaghana[177] refers to that highest person
which, considered as the object of meditation, had previously been
introduced as the general topic. For the consequence of that supposition
would be that that highest