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

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

ledge.” What this involves for the individual is very clearly explained in our Upanisad, III, 2, 12, where it is said that when a man dies, ‘‘ what does not go out of him is the name (7@ma, ‘“‘noumenon”’), that is without-end (ananta), and inasmuch as what-is-without-end is the Several Angels, thereby he wins accordingly the world without-end.” The Several Angels is the Trinity of Persons, as explained below, p. 64. The notion of “name” has to be understood in connection with that doctrine of the Word, vac, and that of the utterance, vyahytt, of the worlds: ‘“‘ name” is “idea,” and what is meant by the endlessness of names in their persistence as prototypes of acts?® in the consciousness that is the Self, whose remembrance (manana) is our existence (sthitt). That is a persistence, as it were of “ art in the artist ” (Eckhart, 1,285), in the Triune Intellect, or Buddhist Alaya-vijiana, what Eckhart calls our “storehouse of ideas and incorporeal forms,’ I, 402, “‘ God’s art,” I, 461, “ all creatures in their natural mode are exemplified in the divine essence,’ 1, 253. That eternity of individual prototypes of all the accidents of being is by no means the same thing as an individual immortality of the soul, as now conceived, in no way a reward, but purely abstract and “ nominal.’ That is brought out very clearly in the Kausitaki Up., Il, 12-15, where the immortality of the angelic powers of the soul is not with respect to their specific integration as a given individual, but with respect to the return of the several powers or elements of consciousness to their single source in the knowing Self, almost literally in the words of Eckhart “ combining with each divine power she is that power in God,” I, 380. That loss of creaturehood, and therewith loss of God as an external object of devotion Eckhart calls the “lowest death of the soul on her way to divinity,” Ie yi

We do not mean to say that a perpetuity (sthayita) of individual consciousness without further change of state