[Footnote 26:  As is demonstrated very satisfactorily by Ramanuja.]

[Footnote 27:  Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads pp. 213 ff.]

[Footnote 28:  I cannot discuss in this place the Maya passages of the Svetasvatara and the Maitrayaniya Upanishads.  Reasons which want of space prevents me from setting forth in detail induce me to believe that neither of those two treatises deserves to be considered by us when wishing to ascertain the true immixed doctrine of the Upanishads.]

[Footnote 29:  The I/s/vara who allots to the individual souls their new forms of embodiment in strict accordance with their merit or demerit cannot be called anything else but a personal God.  That this personal conscious being is at the same time identified with the totality of the individual souls in the unconscious state of deep dreamless sleep, is one of those extraordinary contradictions which thorough-going systematisers of Vedantic doctrine are apparently unable to avoid altogether.]

[Footnote 30:  That section of the introduction in which the point referred to in the text is touched upon will I hope form part of the second volume of the translation.  The same remark applies to a point concerning which further information had been promised above on page v.]

[Footnote 31: 

  Cosi tra questa
  Immensita s’annega il pensier mio,
  E il naufrago m’ e dolce in qnesto mare. 
  LEOPARDI.
]

VEDANTA-SUTRAS

WITH

SA@NKARA BHASHYA.

SA@NKARA’S INTRODUCTION

FIRST ADHYAYA.

FIRST PADA.

REVERENCE TO THE AUGUST VASUDEVA!

It is a matter not requiring any proof that the object and the subject[32] whose respective spheres are the notion of the ‘Thou’ (the Non-Ego[33]) and the ‘Ego,’ and which are opposed to each other as much as darkness and light are, cannot be identified.  All the less can their respective attributes be identified.  Hence it follows that it is wrong to superimpose[34] upon the subject—­whose Self is intelligence, and which has for its sphere the notion of the Ego—­the object whose sphere is the notion of the Non-Ego, and the attributes of the object, and vice versa to superimpose the subject and the attributes of the subject on the object.  In spite of this it is on the part of man a natural[35] procedure—­which which has its cause in wrong knowledge—­not to distinguish the two entities (object and subject) and their respective attributes, although they are absolutely distinct, but to superimpose upon each the characteristic nature and the attributes of the other, and thus, coupling the Real and the Unreal[36], to make use of expressions such as ‘That am I,’ ’That is mine.[37]’—­But what have we to understand by the term ’superimposition?’—­The apparent presentation, in the form of remembrance, to consciousness of something previously observed, in some other thing.[38]