ressions as modifications
of the avidya. The d@r@s@tis@r@s@tivada theory approaches
nearest to the Vijnanavada Buddhism, only with this difference
that while Buddhism does not admit of any permanent being
Vedanta admits the Brahman, the permanent unchangeable
reality as the only truth, whereas the illusory and momentary
perceptions are but impositions on it.

The mental and physical phenomena are alike in this, that
both are modifications of ajnana. It is indeed difficult to
comprehend the nature of ajnana, though its presence in consciousness
can be perceived, and though by dialectic criticism
all our most well-founded notions seem to vanish away and
become self-contradictory and indefinable. Vedanta explains
the reason of this difficulty as due to the fact that all these
indefinable forms and names can only be experienced as modes
of the real, the self-luminous. Our innate error which we continue
from beginningless time consists in this, that the real in
its full complete light is ever hidden from us, and the glimpse

479

that we get of it is always through manifestations of forms
and names; these phenomenal forms and names are undefinable,
incomprehensible, and unknowable in themselves, but under
certain conditions they are manifested by the self-luminous real,
and at the time they are so manifested they seem to have a
positive being which is undeniable. This positive being is only
the highest being, the real which appears as the being of those forms
and names. A lump of clay may be moulded into a plate or a
cup, but the plate-form or the cup-form has no existence or being
apart from the being of the clay; it is the being of the clay that
is imposed on the diverse forms which also then seem to have
being in themselves. Our illusion thus consists in mutually misattributing
the characteristics of the unreal forms--the modes of
ajnana and the real being. As this illusion is the mode of all our
experience and its very essence, it is indeed difficult for us to
conceive of the Brahman as apart from the modes of ajnana.
Moreover such is the nature of ajnanas that they are knowable
only by a false identification of them with the self-luminous
Brahman or atman. Being as such is the highest truth, the
Brahman. The ajnana states are not non-being in the sense of
nothing of pure negation (_abhava_), but in the sense that they are
not being. Being that is the self-luminous illuminates non-being,
the ajnana, and this illum