Mr. Colebrooke on the Philosophy of the Hindus. 39 



text of Badarayana, and little in the gloss of S'ancara. Its paramount 

 efficacy is a tenet of another branch of the Veddnta school, which follows 

 the authority, of the Bhagavad-gitd. In that work, as in many of the Pii- 

 rdnas, passages relative to this topic recur at every turn. 



The fruit of works is the grand subject of the first mimdnsd, which treats 

 of religious duties, sacrifices, and other observances. 



The latter mimdnsd more particularly maintains the doctrine of divine 

 grace. It treats o? free -mil, which it in effect denies ; but endeavours to 

 reconcile the existence of moral evil under the government of an all-wise, all- 

 powerful, and benevolent providence, with the absence of free-will, by 

 assuming the past eternity of the universe, and the infinite renewals of 

 worlds into which every individual being has brought the predispositions 

 contracted by him in earlier states, and so retrospectively without beginning 

 or limit. 



The notion, that the \^ersatile world is an illusion (rndyd), that all which 

 passes to the apprehension of the waking individual is but a phantasy pre- 

 sented to his imagination, and every seeming thing is unreal and all is 

 visionary, does not appear to be the doctrine of the text of the Veddnta. 

 I have remarked nothing which countenances it in the stUras of Vyasa nor 

 in the gloss of S'ancara, but much conceming it in the minor commentaries 

 and in elementary treatises. I take it to be no tenet of the original Veddn- 

 tin philosophy, but of another brancii, from which later writers have bor- 

 rowed it, and have intermixed and confounded the two systems. The doc- 

 trine of the early Veddnta is complete and consistent, without this graft of 

 a later growth. 



