47. He set them in their various laws and customs, as he saw them in the city of his mind, for the purpose of their temporal and spiritual welfare.
48. He thought upon the innumerable varieties of sástras which had existed before, and all of which came to exist on earth in their visible forms, from their prototypes in his eternal mind; like the flowers springing from the womb of the vernal season.
49. Thus O Ráma! did Brahmá take upon him the form of the lotus-born, and create by his activity, all the different creatures upon their models existent in his mind, which took their various forms in the visible world at his will. (So the Sufi and Platonic doctrine of the phenomenal, as a copy of the noumena, or the suari zahiri as but a shadow of the suvari manavi or catini. See Allami).
CHAPTER XLV.
DEPENDANCE OF ALL ON GOD.
Argument. The mind being a finite production, its product of the world, is as unreal as the thoughts of the mind.
Vasishtha continued:—The world appearing as substantial, has nothing substantive in it; it is all a vacuity and mere representation of the imageries and vagaries of the mind.
2. Neither is time nor space filled by any world at all, but by the great spirit, who has no form except that of vacuum. (The spirit of God fills the infinite vacuity from all eternity).
3. This is all imaginary, and as visionary as a city seen in a dream; whatever is seen any where is fallacy, and existing in the infinite vacuity. (All is void amidst the great void of Brahma’s Mind).
4. It is a painting without its base, and a vision of unrealities; it is an uncreated creation, and a variegated picture in empty air (without its canvas).
5. It is the imagination of the mind, that has stretched the three worlds, and made the many bodies contained in them. Reminiscence is the cause of these creations, as the eyesight is the cause of vision.