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BRAHMANISM of the carth, all the Jouds in their courses, and the sun. Such a niggardly hoarder cuts himself off from the divine metabolism of the living world. His food avails him nothing: when he cats, he eats his own death.
The command of the hymn, the solemn proclamation made through its stanzas by the holy substance, amounts to a kind of cosinic Communist Manifesto,with respect at least to food. Food is to remain common to all beings. Solemnly, the hymn sum. mons the Truth to witness in the plurasc "I declare thc Truth”; wherewith a cosmic curse is put upon the head of any rugged individualist who should be concerned to look out only for himself. “It will be his death," the hymn declares; the nourishing substance in his mouth will turn to poison.
The gods arc older than men, much older, yet they too were born; they are not eternal or self-existent. They are but the first offspring of the cosmic force-substance which is food, the earliest self-manifestation of that transcendent primary power. And since they were born they must also dic. There can be no such thing as eternity for created, individualized forms. But if not for thc gods, then how for lesser beings? Inhaling and exhaling the breath of life, begetting offspring and withering away, the numberless organisins of all the spheres ol existence support the phases of a single, rhythmic, inevitable process of passage. They make manifest and suffer the metamorphoses of what is intrinsically, in itself. an everlasting freshness-a tireless immortality. Fecding on the divine substance in the form of the others and becoming in turn their food, cach is but a moment in a magnitudinous universal play of transformations, a lively shiftingabout of masks; for such wild abandonment as characterizes this game of feeding belongs to the state of being a mask. What the masks conceal is everywhere the same: "the source," "the center," the anonymous divine lifc-force which has no face yet wears the masks of all the faces of life.
The individuals consolation lies in knowing that behind and
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |