the former is that which produces the pragmatic, but, in a transcendental sense, the ‘unreal’ notion of self and otherness. This is the root cause of error (whether in knowing, feeling, or action) which becomes manifest as the ‘Six Poisons’ (which Hindus call the ‘Six Enemies’) of the Six Lokas of Sangsāra (of which the Text gives five only)—pride, jealousy, sloth (or ignorance), anger, greed, and lust. The Text constantly urges upon the dying or ‘dead’ man to recognize in the apparitions, which he is about to see or sees, the creatures of his own māyā-governed mind, veiling from him the Clear Light of the Void. If he does so, he is liberated at any stage.
This philosophical scheme has so obvious a resemblance to the Indian Māyāvāda Vedānta that the Vaishnava Padma Purāna dubs that system ‘a bad scripture and covert Buddhism’ (māyāvādam asachchāstram prachchhannam bauddham). Nevertheless, its great scholastic, ‘the incomparable Shangkarāchāryya’, as Sir William Jones calls him, combated the Buddhists in their denial of a permanent Self (Ātmā), as also their subjectivism, at the same time holding that the notion of an individual self and that of a world of objects were pragmatic truths only, superseded by and on the attainment of a state of Liberation which has little, if anything, to distinguish it from the Buddhist Void. The difference between the two systems, though real, is less than is generally supposed. This is a matter, however, which it would be out of place to discuss further here.
However this may be, the after-death apparitions are ‘real’ enough for the deceased who does not, as and when they appear, recognize their unsubstantiality and cleave his way through them to the Void. The Clear Light is spoken of in the Bardo Thödol as such a Dazzlement as is produced by an infinitely vibrant landscape in the springtide. This joyous picture is not, of course, a statement of what It is in itself, for It is not an object, but is a translation in terms of objective vision of a great, but, in itself, indescribable joyful inner experience. My attention was drawn, in this connexion, to a passage in a paper on the Avatamsaka Sūtra (ch. xv), by Mr. Hsu, a Chinese scholar, which says, ‘The
