SAIVA-SIDDHANTA

28 AN ANOTHER SIDE.
mirror ?* Whose fault was this ? It was our brother s fault in
not choosing a good mirror. And does he mean to attribute to
the Most Intelligent such fault, in not choosing such a vessel in
which He can see Himself and know Himself to the best advan
tage ? The Perfect cannot seek to know Himself in the imperfect
and the ignorant, the wicked and the sinful, the sorrowing and
the suffering.
If all this is a play of His and no such distinction,
as the imperfect, the wicked and the sinful and the sorrowing
and the suffering, exists, and all this is a hallucination, myth,
non-existence (we use his own choice words), why should any man
aspire to be a good man, a perfect man, a Jivan-mukta? Why
should he realize his identity with the Absolute? God, in trying to
realize Himself (for His sport or for what ?),
became man and
woman and brute ;
and look at the bother of this man, woman or
brute, doing good acts, acts without attachment, real tapas, yoga
andjfiana to realize his identity with the Absolute ! What guar
antee is there that, after all this bother, a Jivan-mukta may not
again be differentiated from the Absolute into a man, woman or
animal? How senseless and vain all these efforts seem, how
ignoble, the purpose of creation and evolution? To the question
does the Perfect become the imperfect, which question our
why
brother states in all its
various forms, vulgar and highly philo
sophic, our brother s answer is that this question is an impossi
ble one, and it should not be put at all ! We have already
pointed out how inconsequential this question and answer is.
But the same question has been put in, and answers, attempted
by learned men who are of our brother s ilk and these answers
;
are various and conflicting in themselves. Of these, Svami
Vivekananda gets most glory. His answer is I do not know.
Mr. Mukhopadhyaya replies that the Svami is wrong, and that
the Perfect does not become the imperfect, God does not become
man. Man is only
a reflexion and as such cannot be God,
According to the Brahmavadin man is a reflexion, is unreal ;
* We have seen in the Bangalore Palace of His Highness, fThe
Maharaja of Mysore, a number of mirrors in which one s face is distorted
in the ugliest and most horrible manner.