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INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
to the fashion of the day, but when the question was of raising a wellconstituted edifice of logical doctrine he based himself on the solid ground of Sauträntika realism. But then the realist position itself suffered from an inherent difficulty which idealists exploited to the full. The difficulty pertained to the problem of envisaging a tangible relationship between a piece of cognition and the physical object that serves as its object. If, as was maintained by the realist, cognition and things physical belong to two different realms of reality, it is really difficult to see how the two stand related to each other. The idealist came out with the agrument that since all that we know of physical things we know through cognition, there is no warrant to suppose that there at all exist physical things independent of cognition. This was a wreckless solution of a genuinely difficult problem, but the realist alternative virtually amounted to confessing that the relation between cognition and things physical is a relation sui generis, an alternative equally suspect. So the controversy went on and on. It is not accidental that in the discussion noticed by us in the beginning of the present investigation, Dharmakirti deserted the realist position only when he realised that there was something essentially enigmatic about the relation alleged to obtain between a piece of cognition and its object. And in his subsequent defence of idealism he adopts the usual idealist practice of taking full advantage of the very difficulty here brought to light. So Dharmakirti the logician's account of cognition as such deserves some futher consideration.
Dharmakirti has attributed to cognition two essential characteristics, viz. (1) its bearing the form of the object concerned and (2) its cognising itself. Now cognition being ex hypothesi something nonphysical and its object being something physical it has to be admitted that cognition can bear the form of its object only in some figurative sense, the net import of Dharmakīrti's thesis being that a piece of cognition must possess some such characteristic as makes it the cognition of this object rather than that; and as thus put, the thesis is thoroughly unexceptionable though also platitudinous. So according to Dharmakirti the only essential characteristic of cognition is that it cognises itself (Dharmakirti himself emphasizes the point by saying that the relation of bearing the same form' is possible between any two objects whatever, so that this is not what distinguishes a piece of cognition from what is not cognition)30. But the difficulty with this characteristic is that it contains reference to.cognition itself and so cannot serve as a defining characteristic of cognition. Thus judged from
| SR No. | 006972 |
| Book Title | Indian Philosophy |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Nagin J Shah |
| Publisher | Sanskrit Sanskriti Granthmala |
| Publication Year | 1998 |
| Total Pages | 162 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 14 MB |