For the passage, ’Having created that he entered into it,’ declares the creator, i.e. the unmodified Brahman, to constitute the Self of the embodied soul, in consequence of his entering into his products.  The following passage also, ’Entering (into them) with this living Self I will evolve names and forms’ (Ch.  Up.  VI, 3, 2), in which the highest divinity designates the living (soul) by the word ‘Self,’ shows that the embodied Self is not different from Brahman.  Therefore the creative power of Brahman belongs to the embodied Self also, and the latter, being thus an independent agent, might be expected to produce only what is beneficial to itself, and not things of a contrary nature, such as birth, death, old age, disease, and whatever may be the other meshes of the net of suffering.  For we know that no free person will build a prison for himself, and take up his abode in it.  Nor would a being, itself absolutely stainless, look on this altogether unclean body as forming part of its Self.  It would, moreover, free itself, according to its liking, of the consequences of those of its former actions which result in pain, and would enjoy the consequences of those actions only which are rewarded by pleasure.  Further, it would remember that it had created this manifold world; for every person who has produced some clearly appearing effect remembers that he has been the cause of it.  And as the magician easily retracts, whenever he likes, the magical illusion which he had emitted, so the embodied soul also would be able to reabsorb this world into itself.  The fact is, however, that the embodied soul cannot reabsorb its own body even.  As we therefore see that ’what would be beneficial is not done,’ the hypothesis of the world having proceeded from an intelligent cause is unacceptable.

22.  But the separate (Brahman, i.e. the Brahman separate from the individual souls) (is the creator); (the existence of which separate Brahman we learn) from the declaration of difference.

The word ‘but’ discards the purvapaksha.—­We rather declare that that omniscient, omnipotent Brahman, whose essence is eternal pure cognition and freedom, and which is additional to, i.e. different from the embodied Self, is the creative principle of the world.  The faults specified above, such as doing what is not beneficial, and the like, do not attach to that Brahman; for as eternal freedom is its characteristic nature, there is nothing either beneficial to be done by it or non-beneficial to be avoided by it.  Nor is there any impediment to its knowledge and power; for it is omniscient and omnipotent.  The embodied Self, on the other hand, is of a different nature, and to it the mentioned faults adhere.  But then we do not declare it to be the creator of the world, on account of ‘the declaration of difference.’  For scriptural passages (such as, ’Verily, the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be perceived, to be marked,’ B/ri/.  Up.  II, 4, 5;