CN8

Manu is said to have been the first man, the progenitor of the human race, the first of mankind, the formulator of sacred rites, and the founder of social order. Tradition teaches of a succession of fourteen Manus, each of whom is said to rule for a definite world-period.

The Laws of Manu, or the Manava Dharma Shastra, one of the most venerated of the scriptures of India, have been called "Medicine for the Soul".

Every great civilization possesses the tradition of some original formulator of laws for the guidance of human activities and the definition of man's right relationship to his Divine Source, to the Cosmos, which is the field of his activities, and to his fellow men.

The Laws of Manu have their correspondence in the Babylonian Laws of Hammurabi, the Hebrew Laws of Moses, the Greek Laws of Solon, the Roman legislation of Numa, and in those of other great civilizations when traced back to their earliest recorded traditions.

The work covers the complete field of law, including the essential relationships of mankind to the three all-inclusive Heads: the Divine, the Cosmic, and the Human Principles.

Divine Laws are the eternal Causes through which the Cosmos and Man are brought into existence in perfect order; whereby they are related to the spiritual world.

Since the Laws of Creation are primary, eternal and inevitable, it is evident that man must have a definite knowledge of those underlying laws which control and perfect all things: hence in this book of Laws there is an account of creation.

"This universe subsisted only in the first Divine Idea, as yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, unperceived, indefinable, unknowable by reasoning, and undiscovered by revelation, as though it were wholly immersed in sleep."

The objective universe is the manifestation of the subjective universe which subsists eternally as one Divine Idea. It is "as if involved in darkness" and "immersed in sleep" to all below it, and therefore unknowable to the finite intelligence.

"Then the Divine Self-subsistent, Himself undiscerned, though making discernible this world, with the great elements and other principles of nature, appeared with supernal power, dispelling the darkness."

"He whom the enlightened mind alone can perceive, Who is indivisible and eternal, even He, the Source of all beings, Whom no being can comprehend, shone forth of His own will."

The Self-subsistent is perhaps best regarded as primal Being, Who is incomprehensible in His fullness to any being, but mystically discernible to the enlightened...

"He, having willed to produce manifold beings from His own divine substance, first with a thought created the waters and placed therein a productive seed."

"That seed became a golden egg, more brilliant than the luminary, with a thousand beams, and in that egg He Himself was born in the form of Brahma, the Progenitor of the whole world."

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