^{page 95 note 1} “Non-existent”: things considered apart and as they are in themselves (ordo per esse) are naught when compared to the Essence in and whereby they subsist, cf. Augustine, St., Confessionum, xi, 4Google Scholar, quo coraparato nee pulchra sunt, nee bona sunt, nec sunt, and ib. esse quidem, guoniam abs te sunt, non esse autem, quoniam id quod es non sunt, i.e. “Compared with Whom, things are neither beautiful, nor good, nor are they at all”, and “A being they have, because they are from Thee: and yet no being, because what Thou art, they are not.”

Yad-bkede also corresponds to St. Thomas, Quaest. disp. de veritate, q. 8, a. 7, ad 2, Omnis creatura … si consideratur sine hoc qvod ab alio habet, est nihil ei tenebra et falsitas, cf. Eckhart, Super Oratione Dominica, temporalia, maxime respeclu aeternorum, nichil sunt. St. Thomas, indeed, is careful to add that non est intelligendum, quod essentia sua sit tenebra vel falsitas, nor does this differ in any respect from the Vedantic position, which likewise asserts the absolute reality of the ātman which is the vastu of all things.

The expression “man's last end” is taken from the text immediately preceding the hymn, which is an answer to the false assertion that “the Essence is not to be taken as man's last end” (ātmano' purusârthatve prâpte), the opponent maintaining that “man's last end is merely the cessation of ill” (duhkhâbhāvârtham eva). The actual refrains give only hatharh vada “How can you assert ?” (or variants of these words), a following ātmano' puruṣârtthatvam being understood.

The rendering of ātman by “Essence” and “essence” (respectively paraâtman or antarātman, and pratyagātman or adhyātman), which I adopt henceforth in place of the customary “Self” and “self” (awkward in English in various ways, and especially because of the connotation “selfish”), has great advantages, both as being more exact in reference and as facilitating comparisons (the problem of the identity or distinction of the divine and human essences being treated at length in Christian theology, which asserts their distinction, and in this respect diverges from metaphysics according to which tat tram asi). Essence (essentia) is that by which a thing is (habet esse) in any mode whatever. Adopting the translation “essence” we have then a perfectly logical trilogy of ātman as that by which a thing is; nāma, or “form”, as that by which a thing is what it is; and rūpa, the phenomenal aspect, in which the thing is as it is. The same trilogy corresponds to the Christian “body, soul, and spirit” = “matter, form, and essence”, and again to the Hindu concepts of the anna-maya, mano-maya, and ānanda-maya “sheaths”, the māṁsa, divya, and “eyes”, and like formulae. The identity of “essence” with “life-breath” or “spirit” will be evident; ātman, like prâna, derives from an “to breathe”, or perhaps from vā “to blow”, and the consubstantiality of essence and spirit is constantly asserted or implied in the Vedas, e.g. Eg Veda, vii, 87, 2, ālmā te rāto “the Gale that is Thine Essence”, or wherever Matarisvan is referred to as the kindler of Agni, Who is in fact “self-kindled” or, better, “kindled by His own Essence”; cf. Rg Veda, x, 129, 2, where “in the beginning, That One” (the same as Mrtyu, not yet ātmanvī in Brhaddranyaia Up., i, 2, 1) “suspires without spiration”, ānīt avāta = , Maitri Up., vi, 26). Rendering ātman thus by “essence”, we reserve “spirit”, “breath”, “gale”, “life”, etc., for , vāta, vāyu. Assuming ātman to be Essence, the Buddha's last words take on a new significance, thus: “Be ye such as have the Essence for their light, the Essence for their refuge, and no other.”

The rendering of ātman by “essence” is referentially correct, inasmuch as the ātman is precisely that unchangeable reality which underlies all accidents. The rendering is nevertheless experimental, and it may well prove better to render ātman by Spirit or Spirant, in closer accordance with the etymology, and at the same time avoiding the difficulty that is occasioned by the employment of essence univocally with respect to things as they are in themselves and things as they are in God. Ātman as Brahman is coincident with a being that is not in any mode; ātman in the individual is not that individual's “essence”, but the sine qua non of an esse habere or existence in any mode. In verse 1, then, we might have read “that Spirant that is the spirant in every substance”, or even “that Life that is the life in every substance”, bearing always in mind that Essence, Spiration, and Life are idem in seipso, one and the same in the subject referred to, although apparently manifold in the worlds of “knowledge of” (avidyā).

^{page 96 note 2} We render Brahmā (m.) by “Maker”, the Creator, God as Deity in actu being intended; and similarly in the sixth verse.

^{page 96 note 3} “Dark-world” renders tamos: from the Vedic point of view the creation is essentially a penetration of the Dark-world by Light, the Supernal Sun “releasing all things in their kind” (viśvā prati muñcate, v, 91, 2), which were veiled by Darkness (tamasi, x, 129, 3) in the beginning (ib. and Maitri Up., vi, 2).

The concept of procession upon wings corresponds to that of the divine procession as symbolized in the Rg Veda, e.g. iii, 54, 8, carat patatri “He proceeds on wings”, and vi, 9, 5, “Intellect is the swiftest of birds,” while Agni's motion is several times described as a falcon or eagle's swoop (cf. Bloomfield, , “The legend of Soma and the Eagle,” JAOS. xvi, 1, pp. 11–15).Google Scholar To represent the Spirit and all Angels as birds is common to tradition universally; in Christianity, for example, the Holy Ghost is represented by a dove (and this “dove” is the same as that dove which when it leaves the ark finds that the Tree of Life has appeared above the ebbing Waters, and “does not return”, but perches there, being, as Dante expresses it, “the power that is form unto the nests,” Paradiso, xviii, 110Google Scholar, an image constantly recurring in the Rg Veda and Upanisads, e.g. Rg Veda, x, 91, 2, where Agni “like a bird makes His home in every tree”, vane vane śiśriye talkvīr iva, and Maitrāyanīya Up., iii, 2, “He fetters himself like a bird in the net”).

“Enjoyment” and “satisfaction” are employed respectively to render moda and pramoda; the terms are placed in apposition to “wings” in the dual, and it is clear that a distinction of meaning is intended. We take it that there is allusion to the well-known figure of the two birds that perch in the Tree of Life, one eating of its fruit, the other looking on (Rg Veda, i, 164, 20–21), and that moda and pramoda represent their respective modes of enjoyment; the figure of the two birds being replaced by that of the two wings of the single bird. Our view that pramoda refers to the vision of the whole (viśvam abhicaṭe, Rg Veda, i, 164, 44, etc.), and moda to that of the parts, is confirmed by the use of the expression pramudam prayāti in Svātmanirūpana, 95, where it is said that “the Essence, regarding the world-picture painted by the Essence on the canvas of the Essence, experiences a great satisfaction”. A close parallel can be found in Genesis, where at the end of each day's work God sees that it is “good”, but when all is done, that it is “very good”, cf. Augustine, St., Confessionsl, xiii, 28Google Scholar, “Thou sawest everything that Thou hadst made, and behold it was not only Good, but also Very Good, as being now altogether.”

It is also of much significance that the divine procession in both aspects (adhidaivata and adhyātma) is referred to as essentially and altogether a blissful experience (cf. Rg Veda, vii, 87, 2, “Like an untamed hart that takes his pleasure in the pastures,” and Eckhart, “The joy and satisfaction of it are ineffable”); where we might perhaps have expected the assertion of an experience of pleasure and pain as the twin wings of procession, and might have looked for a corresponding contemptus mundi. There is evidently assumed, on the contrary, an intrinsic perfection of all things; which perfection if realized in so far as they are known essentially and not by their accidents; it is assumed, in other words, that the Comprehensor's (vidvān) knowledge of ill is like the divine understanding wholly sub specie boni.

The notions of the “two wings” and of moda and pramoda are evidently derived from Taittirīya Up., ii, 2, where the wings are identified with prâṇa and apāna in the prâṇna-maya hypostasis, and ii, 5, where moda and pramoda are the right and left sides of the ānanda-maya substance of the superessential Person. In Rg Veda, x, 14, 16, the Only Great (ekam bṛhat) “flies into the six worlds”.

^{page 97 note 4} One of the many Vedântie texts in which the Transcendence as well as the Immanence of the Essence is asserted. The Siddhântamuktâvalī itself elsewhere (pp. 67–8), assuming Immanence (vyāpakatva) and Universal Presence of the Whole Essence (sarvasambandhatvaṁ sarvâtmanā), shows that Transcendence is necessarily implied; for if one finite thing could be pervaded by the whole essence of another finite thing, the two things would be one and the same; therefore that Essence which is assumed to be wholly present to every finite thing must be itself an Infinite Essence.

In the course of the argument it appears incidentally that finite things are by no means regarded as wholly non-existent (asat), but only as false (mithya) in the sense of being inexplicable (anirvacanīya) if considered apart from the Essence that is their support (adhiṣṭhāna). It would be obvious in any case that asat could only apply to “things” to the extent that they are not wholly in act, an entity (sattva) being by hypothesis what is in act and therefore has being (sat). Cf. St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., i, q. 16, a. lc, “Everything is said to be true absolutely in so far as it is related to the intellect from which it depends … natural things are said to be true in so far as they express the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind,” and ib. q. 17, a. lc, “In relation to our intellect, natural things which are compared thereto accidentally can be called false; not simply, but relatively,” i.e. with respect to our misapprehension of their true nature; “a thing is said to be false that naturally begets a false opinion,” for example, when we call “tin, false gold”; which corresponds exactly to the Vedântic exemplum of the snake and the rope; and “although the falsity is not in the thing but in the intellect” (which represents the equivalent of the Vedântic theory of avidyā), St. Thomas would certainly have agreed to call natural things “false” in so far as they are mistakenly regarded as independently selfsubsistent. Thus it appears that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to state a distinction of the Christian from the Vedantic doctrine in the matter of external reality.

We venture to add, without being able to cite authority, that to assert an absolute or simple “unreality” of “things” would be not only a contradiction in terms (“real” deriving from res, “thing”) but also false in fact, in that a denial of reality to things would be (as suggested above) to assert their existence merely in potentia, whereas by hypothesis “things” are always at least partly in act, or else are not things.

“Maker” renders Brahmā; and coresponds to “Golden Germ” in the next verse. Hiraṇyagarbha (the “Golden Germ”) = Agni-Prajāpati, the Year, the Sun, etc., i.e. God in actu, or as correctly understood by , saguṇa, martya, apara Brahman, i.e. Brahmā. Cf. KaǦDha Up., ii, 11, where Naciketas surrenders the heavenly world that is the natural term of the devayāna for the sake of the Supreme Identity altogether without otherness. It is a well-known Aupanisada (and Buddhist) thought that man's last end is not accomplished with the attainment of a Heaven, in which all desires are fulfilled, but lies beyond; and it is repeatedly asserted that the manifested, i.e. manifestable aspect of deity, represents but a “little fraction” of the whole divine being, which can only be grasped, if at all, by the via remotionis (nêti, nêti, etc.), the possibilities of non-manifestation infinitely transcending those of manifestation. This relative disparagement of deity in act is exactly paralleled in Eckhart (see i, 274–8 in the Evans edition), when he says “the soul has got to die to all the activity of the divine nature if she is to enter the divine essence where God is altogether idle”; here “where God is altogether idle” = Śānta ātmani, “in the Essence at rest,” Kaṭha Up., iii, 13.

^{page 97 note 5} “All longings,” kāmāḥ, cf. Brhadāraṇyaka Up., iv, 3, 21–9. Kāmāḥ here also corresponds to early Buddhist taṇhā, as the origin of ill.

^{page 98 note 6} “Form of Refreshment,” āhlāda-rūpatā. “Deep Sleep” (suṣupta) is a technical term in the well-known classification of modes of consciousness as “Waking”, “Dream”, and “Deep Sleep”, designating the worldly, angelic, and divine modes of understanding; Deep Sleep being synonymous with samādhi, where the distinction of knower and known no longer confuses the understanding, or, in other words, where kndwledge-as perfects the imperfection of knowledge-of. Dharaṇa, dhyāna, and samādhi (= suṣupta) in Yoga correspond to St. Bernard's consideratio, contemplatio, and excessus or raptus, but with this distinction, that the Christian excessus is usually an ec-stasis, the Hindu samādhi rather an “in-stasis”.

Note the correspondence of suṣupta with suṣupana characterizing Ahi-Vrtra in RV. iv, 19, 3; the significance is developed in my “Angel and Titan”, to appear at once in the JAOS.; cf. also note 9.

“Brute beast,” paśu, i.e. less than man and only fit to be offered up in sacrifice by others; cf. Brhadāraṇyaka Up., i, 4, 10, “Whoever worships any Angel as other than the Essence, thinking ‘He is one, and I another’, does not understand, and is like a beast for the Angels,” and Aitarcya Aranyaka, ii, 3, 2, where paśu is defined as “whose discrimination is merely by hunger and thirst” (aśanā-pipäse eva ), i.e. whose understanding is merely empirical and estimative. In Aitareya Āraṇyaka, loc. cit., the distinction made is of puruṣa (person) from paśu (animal), cf. Boethius, Contra Evtychen, ii, “there is no person of a horse or ox or any other of the animals which dumb and unreasoning live a life of sense alone, but we say there is a person of a man, of God, or an angel.”

^{page 98 note 7} “Norm,” pramāṇra, “which is now as it ever was,” apūrvādi; St. Augustine's “Wisdom uncreate, the same now as it ever was, and the same to be for evermore” (Confessions, ix, 10); sanātana dharma, the everlasting, self-revealed, and self-consistent Veda. It is assumed that the Veda is not the work of any author, human or divine, but presents itself to the divine omniscience in eternity (cf. the Christian doctrine of “eternal reasons”), and has been revealed (cf. Rg Veda, x, 71, Muṇḍaka Up., i, 1, etc.), for which reason it is commonly spoken of as Śruti, “that which has been heard,” as, for example, in verse 6 below, where Sruti is rendered by “selfrevealed word”. For a fuller exposition of the fundamental doctrine of the eternity of the Vedas see the Mīmāṁsā Nyāya Prakāśa, 6, in Edgerton's version, New Haven, 1929.

The doctrine does not, of course, imply that the actual words in which the Veda is expressed are themselves eternal, but that that which was heard, and has been transmitted, is in itself eternal. Christianity in the same way speaks of “eternal truths” without implying that the ipsissima verba of Scripture in any one language are eternal as such.

“Being, Intellect, Beatitude,” sac-cit-ananda; cf. St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., i, q. 26, a. lc, with respect to God's beatitude, “Beatitude is the perfect good of an intellectual nature.”

^{page 98 note 8} “Of no-otherness,” advaya. The Vedanta cannot properly be defined as a monistic system, but only by its own name as a doctrine of “No-otherness” (advaita); “God” (ïśvara) being spoken of as “One” rather in relation than as He is essentially, viz. “Without-otherness”. “No-otherness” excludes both number and quality; “That” is inconnumerable and simple. This is also Christian doctrine (Boethius, De Trin. ii, nulla igitur in eo diversitas … nec numerus). The conclusion follows that things in their thingishness (yathā-bhūta, i.e. as they are accidentally, or to use a familiar Christian expression “in their creaturehood”) are non-essential (an-ātmya), which is the Mahayana formulation; or, in other words, that things have essence (ātman) only in abstraction from the accidents by which we apperceive them, which essence is therefore “Not, not” (nêti, nêti) anything that can be predicated of the thing in its thingishness (astitva), and this is the Vedantic formulation.

^{page 98 note 9} “In the very principle,” cf. “on the canvas of the Essence,” cited above in note 3.

For abodha and bodha we prefer to retain the primary senses of “slumber” or “unawareness” on the one hand and “awakening” on the other, although the more familiar “ignorance” and “enlightenment” are also implied. For in this way the continuity of the traditional thought is better seen; procedure from potentiality (the condition of asuratva) to act (the condition of devatva) being constantly described as an awakening from stupor or slumber; this is found especially in connection with Agni as uṣarbudh “awakening at dawn”, and in connection with the Angels generally, who are sometimes referred to as “wake”, i.e. “quick” in the Biblical sense. Ih the same way the Buddha's “enlightenment” is really a “complete awakening”, sambodhi. But life in the worlds, being still an admixture of potentiality and act, torpor and life, is a continuous process of awakening, which when it is accomplished implies a despiration (nirvāṇa) and a return (nivṛtti) upstream (pratihūla), and for this reason the Complete Awakening is described in terms of “inverse thinking” (pratyak cetanā, Yoga Sūtra, i, 29) as “Deep Sleep” (see note 6), which Deep Sleep is contrasted with the mere “wakefulness” (jagrat) of the empirical consciousness or possible intellect (aśuddha manas, Maitri Up., vi, 34); attainment of the Ultimate Station (param padam), that of the speculative or pure intellect (Śuddha manas or cit) implies a “dementation” (amanibhāva, ib.). In other words, the whole course of the devayāna leads, from the pre-rational, through reason, to the supra-rational.

^{page 99 note 10} “Flux of things,” saṣsāra, Eckhart's “storm of the world-flow”. “Uprush of awareness of the Essence,” ātma-bodha-samunmeṣa.

^{page 99 note 11} The maker of semblant worlds is knowledge-of or epistemological cognition (avidyā) as distinguished from knowledge-as or gnosis (vidyā).

“Self-revealed Word,” Śruti, as in note 7.

^{page 99 note 12} The doctrine of avinâbhāva, or “necessary reciprocal relationship”, is here enunciated; see the many parallel passages cited in my New Approach to the Vedas, p. 9 and note 26.

“Transmitted doctrine” (diṣṭi); either with reference to the body of traditional exegesis (smṛti) or more likely with reference to oral instruction and initiation received from a guru.

^{page 99 note 13} “Plenum,” pūrṇam; cf. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up., v, 1 (almost identical with Atharva Veda, x, 8, 29), “Plenum from plenum taken, plenum yet remains.” This is not a contradiction of avinâbhāva (see previous note), for a plenum could not be essentially infinite (but only numerically or relatively so) if anything remained external to it; i.e. “without me” it would not be infinite.

It is interesting to contrast this position with the difficulty that ensues when the identity of divine and individual essence is denied; St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., iii, q. 93, a. 1, ad 4) is forced to argue that “Although finite added to infinite does not make a greater thing, it makes more things, since finite and infinite are two things, while infinite taken by itself is one”; a tissue of logical inconsistencies, for it is evident that an infinite to which a finite could be added cannot have been an infinite, but merely an incalculable. Boethius knows much better when he says that “Two belongs to the class of things” (duo rebus sunt, De Trin., iii). Infinite plus infinite does not make two things, because infinite is not a “thing”, cf. Böhme, “God is properly called no thing,” cf. Erigena's “God does not know what he is, because He is not any what”.

^{page 99 note 14} “That thou,” i.e. the well-known Aupanisada formula, “That art thou” (tat tvam asi), here contracted to “That thou”(tat tvam).