Gita Rahasya -Tilak 178

Gita Rahasya -Tilak

CHAPTER VIII THE CONSTRUCTIN AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COSMOS guna gunesu, jayante tatraiva nivisanti ca I According to the Bhagavadgita, Matter does not carry on its activities independently, but has to do so according to the will of the Paramesvara. But, as has been stated be- fore, Kapila Rsi considered Matter as independent. According to the Samhkhya philosophy, its union with Spirit is a sufficient proximate cause for its diffusion to commence. Matter needs nothing else for this purpose. The Samkhyas say that as soon as Matter is united with Spirit, its minting starts ; and just as- in spring, trees get foliage and after that, leaves, flowers, and fruits follow one after the other , so also is the fundamental equable state of Matter disrupted, and its constituents begin to spread out. On the other hand, in the Veda-Saihhitas, the Upanisads, and the Smrti texts, the Parabrahman is looked upon as fundamental instead of Matter, and different descriptions are found in those books about the creation of the Cosmos from that Parabrahman (Highest Brahman), namely that : "hiranya-- garbhah samavartatagre bhutasya jatah patir eka asit", i. e., "the Golden Egg first came into existence" . and from this Golden Egg, or from Truth, the whole world was created ; or first, water was created , and from that water, the Cosmos; or that when in this water an egg had come into existence, the Brahmadeva was born out of it, and either from this Brahmadeva, or from the original Egg, the entire world was later on created ; or that the same Brahmadeva (male) was turned, as to half of him, into a female; or that Brahmadeva was a male before water came into existence ; or that from the Parabrahman only three elements, were created, namely, brilliance, water and the earth (food), and that later on, all things were created as a result of the inter- mixture of the three . Nevertheless, there is a, clear conclusion in the Vedanta-Sutras , that the five primordial elements, namely. Ether (akasa) etc., came into existence in their respective order from the fundamental Brahman in the shape of the Atman ; and there are clear references in the Upanisads to prakrti, mahat, and Other elements, e. g., see Katha (3. 11), Maitrayani (6. 10), Svetasvatara etc. From this it can be seen that though according to Vedanta philosophy, Matter is not independent, yet after the stage when a transformation makes its appearance in the Pure Brahman in the shape of an illusory Prakrti, there is an agreement between that philosophy and the Samhkhya philosophy about the subsequent creation of the Cosmos; and it is, therefore, stated in the Mahabharata that: "all knowledge which there is in history or in the Puranas, or in economics has all been derived from Samhkhya. philosophy" .