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

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

imagined for him but that of the Patriarchs, the piiyyana. For deity takes on mortality with all its consequences : hence in the Brhadavanyaka Up., I, 3, 1, the Brahman in a likeness (mirta) is rightly called mortal, martya ; his “hundred years ” are all of time, but not the timeless.‘ That conception of his mortality is echoed too by Eckhart, “God comes and goes . . . God passes away,” “ before creatures were, God was not God,”’ “all the Persons being clapt into their nature vanish into the dim silence of their interior being,’ 1, 143, 218, 469; “they become one,” Attareya Aranyaka, II, 3, 8, ‘‘ where all existence becometh of one nest,” Mahandrayana Up., II, 3.

Insofar,*” then, as Deity is in the world, he is bound by Works, his Will or Providence, being however righteous (dharmya) comparable to the “ ordinary will” based on predilection, is not free: thought of as Rtaspati or Dharmaraja, still he is not above the law, not un-just.** Free-will, in our sense of the words, represents a contradiction in terms : as the Upanisad, cited above, expresses it, and as the Buddhist also felt so strongly, existences are dependent on (upajtvantt), the slaves of, their desires, and that holds equally for good and bad desires, for man and for incarnate God. Man’s free will consists only in a freedom not to will, a freedom to return to the centre of his being, to identify his own will with His Will who “ works willingly but not by will, naturally but not by nature,” Eckhart, 1, 225. The ordinary will extends only to particular goods; but “ the potentiality of the will extends to the universal good . . . just as the object of the intellect extends to universal being,’’ St. Thomas, Sum. Th., 1, Q. 105, A. 4: hence, as Nietsche expresses it, “Whoso hath not surrendered will, no will hath he.” Free-will is not in the order of nature: he is autonomous (svaraj) who knows the Self (aman), but “ those whose knowledge is otherwise than this are heteronomous (anyavajah), theirs are perishing worlds, in none of all the