Hinduism / by Monier Williams.

  • Monier Monier-Williams
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hinduism / by Monier Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    218/254 page 210
    most desirable state which enables a man to annihilate his own individuality, and see God in everything and everything in God. Arjuna is comforted under the distressing thought that he is about to kill his relations, by an argument drawn from the eternal existence of the soul, which is nobly expressed thus : “ The wise grieve not for the departed, nor for those who yet survive. Never was the time when I was not, nor thou, nor yonder chiefs, and never shall be the time when all of us shall not be ; as the embodied soul in this corporeal frame moves swiftly on through boyhood, youth, and age, so will it pass through other forms hereafter—be not grieved thereat. The man whom pain and pleasure, heat and cold affect not, he is fit for immortality. Whatever is not cannot be ; whatever is can never cease to be. Know this—the Being that spread this uni- verse is indestructible. Who can destroy the Indestructible ? These bodies that enclose the everlasting soul, inscrutable, im- mortal, have an end ; but he who thinks the soul can be de- stroyed, and he who deems it a destroyer, are alike mistaken ; it kills not, and is not killed ; it is not born, nor doth it ever die; it has no past nor future—unproduced, unchanging, infinite; he who knows it fixed, unborn, imperishable, indis- soluble, how can that man destroy another, or extinguish ought below ? As men abandon old and threadbare clothes to put on others new, so casts the embodied soul its worn-out frame to enter other forms. No dart can pierce it; flame cannot consume it, water wet it not, nor scorching breezes dry it—in- destructible, incapable of heat or moisture or aridity, eternal, all-pervading, steadfast, immovable, perpetual, yet impercep- tible, incomprehensible, unfading, deathless, unimaginable.” In the second and sixth chapters the duty of Yoga or ‘ intense concentration of the mind on one subject’ (viz. the Supreme Being, here identified with Krishna), till at last the great end of freedom from all thought, perfect calm, and absorption in the Deity are obtained, is enjoined with much force of language, as may be seen from the following extracts : That holy man who stands immovable, As if erect upon a pinnacle,1 1 Kuta-stha (VI. 8) may mean ‘standing erect like a peak.’
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3