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660
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
not be said to appertain to the spectator for this reason.
Starting from this duality of the seer and the seen, Kapila conceives the world to be characterised by an alternation of manifestation and destruction, on the analogy of the alternation of waking and sleeping consciousness.
In the condition of dissolution, the spectacle is reduced to a balanced state of the three attributes, sattva, rajas and tamas (see p. 21 ante). Then there sets in a counter movement; with the disturbance of the equilibrium, the process of manifestation begins, resulting in successive transformations of the evolvent or prakriti (the balanced condition of the attributes), which accounts for the evolution of the spectacle as well as for the organs of sensation. But the most important part of this scheme of evolution, as it might be called, is the order of unfoldment of the twenty-five tattvas (essentials or elements) which constitute the bulwark of the Sankhyan philosophy, and which may be arranged in the following way in a tabulated form :
* Hindu Metaphysicians, it would seem, knew little or nothing about logic, for they never seem to hesitate to base their deductions on analogy. Even the nyaya darśana of Gautama, which literally signifies the school or system of logic, does little more than dismiss the entire subject with the observation that a homogeneous example is the basis of logical inference, the main condition being that no one should be able to cite an instance to the contrary, But this is absurd, for, as Jaina logicians point out, it would warrant our inferring that the future child of a person who has always had boys born to him, would also be a boy!
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