COLEBROOKE, in his account of the Pancharatras or Bhagavatas', says that "a passage quoted by S'amkaracharya in his Commentary on the Vedanta Su'tras (ii. 2. 45), seems to intimate that the promulgator of the Pân'charatras system was S'andilya, who was dissatisfied with the Vedas, not finding in them a prompt and sufficient way of supreme excellence (para-śreyas) and final beatitude; and therefore, he had recourse to this sastra." This however is not the work translated in the following pages, as the doctrines impugned by S'amkara do not agree with those of the present work; nor does it contain the passage quoted by him, or that quoted by Govinda'- nanda in his gloss, which declares that one syllable of a tantra is superior to the four vedas. Hall, in a note to his edition of Wilson's translation of the Vishnu Purana, quotes some lines from Nagèsabhatta's gloss (the Guruvyakhya) on Govardhana's Saptasati, which condemn as repugnant to the Veda the doctrines of the Pân'charatras, the Bhagavatas, the Bauddhas, the Daigambaras, the Lokayatas, etc.; and he adds that these verses are preceded by a denunciation of S'andilya as heretical. This may very probably refer to the supposed author of these aphorisms; but this allusion does not carry us very far back, as Nâges'abhatta was contemporary with Jayasimha, Raja of Jaipur, who lived in the beginning of the eighteenth century.3
The name S'andilya is found in a well-known passage of the Chhandogya Upanishad (iii. 14), which recurs with a few verbal differences in the S'atapatha Brahmana (x. 6.3); the sage is there represented as declaring that the soul within us is Brahman. His doctrine is directly referred to in Aphorism 31 of the present work, and the Commentary quotes the passage from the Chhandegya Upanishad. This doctrine is called the Sandilya-vidya ia the Vedanta-sara, and it is there characterised as consisting of devotional meditations directed towards Brahman viewed as possessed of qualities rather thon as the Absolute. The author of these aphorisms apparently accepts his view as the true one, and contrasts it with those of Kasyapa and Badárayaną (cf. Aph. 29-32), the former of whom is represented as holding that Brahman is other than the individual soul, while the latter holds that the soul is nothing but Brahman, its apparent individuality being only an illusion. But the Sándilya-vidya after all very imperfectly corresponds to the doctrine of the Sandilya sutras, which are properly a Mimamsa of faith (bhakti), as distinguished from the Purva-mimamsa which treats of ceremonial works, and the utlara-mimamsa which treats of knowledge. Their peculiar tenet is that liberation can only be produced by faith, The mundane existence of the individual soul has arisen from the want of faith, not from the want of knowledge; and faith alone can abolish it. Faith effects this by abolishing the internal organ, which is associated with the soul and disguises its real nature.
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