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TANTRA
bliss," absolutely uninvolved in the bondage, ignorance, and misery of the world illusion) the yogic principle won its most impressive triumph. For although it is true that instead of the prc-Aryan, Jaina, and Yoga ideal of the "isolation-integration" (kaivalya) of separate life-monads (jīvas, purușas) the new goal was that of reunion with the one Saccidānanda Brahman, "onewithout-a-second," nevertheless this nondual reunion, this recognition of an identity which in reality had never been forfeited, was understood as being synonymous with a refutation of the false notion of the existence of a cosmos: a dissolution of the "superimposition" due to "ignorance." "That which is untouched by the sixfold wave [of decay and death, hunger and thirst, grief and delusion], meditated upon by the yogi's heart but not grasped by the sense-organs, which the faculty of intuition (buddhi) cannot know, and which is faultless (anavadyam): that Brahman art thou-meditate upon this in thy mind." 58 The same, basic ascetic attitude of rejection as that which in the pre-Aryan past has sundered human experience into the spheres of ajīva and jīva, was now discriminating between saṁsāra and nirvāņa, while striving for identification ("without remainder") with the unimplicated term.
And yet, on the other hand, there flourishes in India, side by side with this attitude of negation, a vigorous affirmation of the world of flux and time, which is just as fearless and absolute, in its own way, as the unflinching self-transcendence of the yogis. In that land the great human effort, looking either way, seems always to have been to break the all-too-human limitations of the mind by means of "inhuman" techniques. The ideals and disciplines of the castes are "inhuman"-humanistically speaking; and in a sense, every Indian, one way or another, is a yogi; for bhakti, the popular Hindu "path of devotion," is itself yoga: an internal "yoking" of the mind to a divine principle. Wherever bhakti is carried to an ultimate statement, as for instance 58 Sankara, Vivekacuḍāmani 256.
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