“How can any one teach concerning Brahma? he is neither the known nor the unknown.  That which cannot be expressed by words, but through which all expression comes, this I know to be Brahma.  That which cannot be thought by the mind, but by which all thinking comes, this I know is Brahma.  That which cannot be seen by the eye, but by which the eye sees, is Brahma.  If thou thinkest that thou canst know it, then in truth thou knowest it very little.  To whom it is unknown, he knows it; but to whom it is known, he knows it not.”

This also is from Windischmann, from the Kathaka Upanishad:  “One cannot attain to it through the word, through the mind, or through the eye.  It is only reached by him who says, ‘It is!  It is!’ He perceives it in its essence.  Its essence appears when one perceives it as it is.”

The old German expression Istigkeit, according to Bunsen, corresponds to this.  This also is the name of Jehovah as given to Moses from the burning bush:  “And God said unto Moses, I AM THE I AM.  Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”  The idea is that God alone really exists, and that the root of all being is in him.  This is expressed in another Upanishad:  “HE WHO EXISTS is the root of all creatures; he WHO EXISTS is their foundation, and in him they rest.”

In the Vedanta philosophy this speculative pantheism is carried further.  Thus speaks Sankara, the chief teacher of the Vedanta philosophy ("Colebrooke’s Essays"):  “I am the great Brahma, eternal, pure, free, one, constant, happy, existing without end.  He who ceases to contemplate other things, who retires into solitude, annihilates his desires, and subjects his passions, he understands that Spirit is the One and the Eternal.  The wise man annihilates all sensible things in spiritual things, and contemplates that one Spirit who resembles pure space.  Brahma is without size, quality, character, or division.”

According to this philosophy (says Bunsen) the world is the Not-Being.  It is, says Sankara, “appearance without Being; it is like the deception of a dream.”  “The soul itself,” he adds, “has no actual being.”

There is an essay on Vedantism in a book published in Calcutta, 1854, by a young Hindoo, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, which describes the creation as proceeding from Maya, in this way:  “Dissatisfied with his own solitude, Brahma feels a desire to create worlds, and then the volition ceases so far as he is concerned, and he sinks again into his apathetic happiness, while the desire, thus willed into existence, assumes an active character.  It becomes Maya, and by this was the universe created, without exertion on the part of Brahma.  This passing wish of Brahma carried, however, no reality with it.  And the creation proceeding from it is only an illusion.  There is only one absolute Unity really existing, and existing without plurality.  But he is like one asleep.  Krishna, in the Gita, says:  ’These works