A new approach to the Vedas : an essay in translation and exegesis

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

wind of creation blow, and why as it blows?” We say akamayat, “by the Will of God,” but that is more of a description than an answer. For his Will is not an arbitrary will, an accident of being, as though He needed anything, but inevitable and essential: as Eckhart expresses it, “‘ think not that it is with God as with a human carpenter, who works or works not as he chooses, who can do or leave undone at his good pleasure. It is not thus with God . . . He must do, willy-nilly,” I, 23 and 263, cf. Saddharma Pundartka, XV (prose), “ the Tathagata does what-must-be-done,” kavtavyam karott. God’s idiosyncrasy are both eternal work and eternal rest. He cannot do otherwise than he does : for his omnipotence does not extend to a capacity for being any other or any less than he is, he cannot make that which has been not to have been, for all that has been is in and of himself, and all the future is.*®

It is not too hard to understand that “ God’s will to the creature was only one, viz., a general manifestation of the spirit,’ Béhme, Signatura Rerum, XVI, 25, Swinburne’s “ Thou biddst me but be.” But the gift of life, “in its explication and manifestation it goes forth from eternity to eternity into two essences, viz., into evil and to good,” Bohme, ibid., 20 ; no manifestation (vyafijana) is conceivable except in terms of pairs of opposites, dvandvau. But how is the distribution of good and evil in the world determined ? That is a knotty problem, for we cannot imagine the eternal energy as having predilection or as playing favourites amongst the figures of its puppet show: nor on the other hand that anything existent has come to be just what it is by mere chance, “existence ’ and “ causality ”’ being connascent concepts of the intellect.

Perhaps to our surprise we shall find that the problem has been treated similarly by Hindu and Christian theologians. Indian tradition, in all its forms, maintains that the individual alone is responsible for all the good or