[CHAPTER X.]
Removal of Ignorance.
Argument.—Ignorance and its bonds of Erroneous conceptions, and reliance on temporal objects, and the ways of getting release from them, by means of good understanding and right reasoning.
VASISHTHA continued:—Therefore this world with all its moving and unmoving beings is nothing (or no being at all). There is nothing that has its real being or entity, except the one true Ens that thou must know. (all beings are not being except the one self-existing Being. So says Sadi. All this is not being and thyself art the only being. Haman nestand anchi hastitue, so also the sruti Toam asi nányadasti. Tu est nullum est).
2. Seek him O Ráma! who is beyond our thought and imagination, and comprises all entity and non-entity in himself, and cease to seek any living being or any thing in existence. (In Him is all life and every thing, that is or is not in Being and he is the source of life and light).
3. I would not have my heart to be enticed and deceived by the false attachments and affections of this world; all which are as delusive, as our misconception of a snake in a rope. (All our earthly relations with our relatives and properties, are deception that are soon detected by our good sense and reason, and they vanish as soon as our mistake of the snake in rope. Therefore let no worldly tie bind down thy heart to this earth).
4. Ignorance of the soul is the cause of our error of conceiving the distinctions of things; but the knowledge of the selfsame soul puts an end to all distinctions of knowledge of the reality of things, distinctive knowledge of existences—bheda jnána is erroneous; but their generalization—abheda jnána leads to right reasoning.
5. They call it ignorance avidyá, when the intellect is vitiated by its intellection of the intelligibles or chetyas, but the intelligibles being left out, it comes to know the soul which is free from all attributes.
6. The understanding only is the embodied soul purusha, which is lost upon the loss of the understanding; but the soul is said to last as long as there is understanding in the body, like the ghatambare or air in the pot lasts with the lasting of the pot, and vanishes upon the loss or breaking of the vessel. (The soul lasts with the intellect in the body, but flies away upon the intellect's desertion of it. This is maintained by sruti).