History of Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 007593
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Surendranath Dasgupta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Year: 1922
Total Pages: 2517
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 125 MB

Page 356

VIII]
Indeterminate Perception
339
not like to dispense with it for they think that it is impossible to have the knowledge of a thing as qualified by a predicate or a quality, without previously knowing the quality or the predicate (visistavaisiṣtyajñānam prati hi viseṣaṇatavacchedakaprakāram jñānam kāraṇam). So, before any determinate knowledge such as "I see a cow," "this is a cow" or "a cow" can arise it must be preceded by an indeterminate stage presenting only the indeterminate, unrelated, predicative quality as nirvikalpa, unconnected with universality or any other relations (jätyādiyojanarahitam vaisiṣṭyānavagāhi niṣprakārakam nirvikalpakam)2. But this stage is never psychologically experienced (atīndriya) and it is only a logical necessity arising out of their synthetic conception of a proposition as being the relationing of a predicate with a subject. Thus Viśvanatha says in his Siddhantamuktāvalī, "the cognition which does not involve relationing cannot be perceptual for the perception is of the form 'I know the jug'; here the knowledge is related to the self, the knower, the jug again is related to knowledge and the definite content of jugness is related to the jug. It is this content which forms the predicative quality (višeṣaṇatāvacchedaka) of the predicate 'jug' which is related to knowledge. We cannot therefore have the knowledge of the jug without having the knowledge of the predicative quality, the contents." But in order that the knowledge of the jug could be rendered possible, there must be a stage at which the universal or the pure predication should be known and this is the nirvikalpa stage, the admission of which though not testified by experience is after all logically indispensably necessary. In the proposition "It is a cow," the cow is an universal, and this must be intuited directly before it could be related to the particular with which it is associated.
But both the old and the new schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeşika admitted the validity of the savikalpa perception which the Buddhists denied. Things are not of the nature of momentary particulars, but they are endowed with class-characters or universals and thus our knowledge of universals as revealed by the perception of objects is not erroneous and is directly produced by objects. The Buddhists hold that the error of savikalpa perception consists in the attribution of jāti (universal), guna (quality), 2 Ibid. p. 809.
1 Tattvacintamani, p. 812.
3 Siddhantamuktavali on Bhāṣapariccheda kärikā, 58.