The Brahma Sūtra clears God of cruelty by making saṃsāra beginningless. Isn’t that too easy?
I have been reading Śaṅkara for forty years, and this passage still bothers me.
Brahma Sūtra 2.1.34 raises the objection that if God creates the world, God is guilty of partiality and cruelty, since some beings are born happy and others miserable. The answer: no, because creation depends on other factors, namely the karma of the beings created. Śaṅkara compares God to the rain, which falls equally on all fields; what grows depends on the seeds.
Then 2.1.35 raises the obvious reply: before the first creation there was no karma, so the first distribution of births must have been God's choice. The answer: no, because saṃsāra has no beginning. There was no first creation and no first distribution.
As an engineer I recognise this move. It is like a chain of explanations in which every link passes the responsibility to the link before it, and there is no first link to hold responsible. It does avoid the problem. But I am not sure it solves it.
Two questions:
- Does a beginningless series of unequal births really need no explanation, as a whole? Or does it simply hide the first inequality by making sure there isn't one?
- Today's question of the day asks whether the world ever started. Is the Vedāntin's answer, that it never did, driven by cosmology at all, or mainly by this moral need?