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VII]
Interpretations of Bhiksu and Vacaspati
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reason why puruşa should be deprived of such a fitness at the time of emancipation, and thus there would be no emancipation at all, for the fitness being in the purusa, he could not be divested of it, and he would continue to enjoy the experiences represented in the buddhi for ever. Vijñāna Bhiksu thus holds that there is a real contact of the purusa with the buddhi state in any cognitive state. Such a contact of the purusa and the buddhi does not necessarily mean that the former will be liable to change on account of it, for contact and change are not synonymous. Change means the rise of new qualities. It is the buddhi which suffers changes, and when these changes are reflected in the purusa, there is the notion of a person or experiencer in the purusa, and when the purusa is reflected back in the buddhi the buddhi state appears as a conscious state. The second, is the difference between Vācaspati and Bhiksu as regards the nature of the perceptual process. Bhiksu thinks that the senses can directly perceive the determinate qualities of things without any intervention of manas, whereas Vācaspati ascribes to manas the power of arranging the sense-data in a definite order and of making the indeterminate sense-data determinate. With him the first stage of cognition is the stage when indeterminate sense materials are first presented, at the next stage there is assimilation, differentiation, and association by which the indeterminate materials are ordered and classified by the activity of manas called samkalpa which coordinates the indeterminate sense materials into determinate perceptual and conceptual forms as class notions with particular characteristics. Bhiksu who supposes that the determinate character of things is directly perceived by the senses has necessarily to assign a subordinate position to manas as being only the faculty of desire, doubt, and imagination.
It may not be out of place to mention here that there are one or two passages in Vacaspati's commentary on the Samkhya kärikä which seem to suggest that he considered the ego (ahamkāra) as producing the subjective series of the senses and the objective series of the external world by a sort of desire or will, but he did not work out this doctrine, and it is therefore not necessary to enlarge upon it. There is also a difference of view with regard to the evolution of the tanmatras from the mahat; for contrary to the view of Vyasabhāṣya and Vijñāna Bhiksu etc. Vācaspati holds that from the mahat there was ahamkara and