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 416

IX]
Self
399
comes meaningless, if things whose presence is excluded are not specified as negative conditions qualifying the perception of the ground. And this would require that we had already the notion of negation in us, which appeared to us of itself in a special manner unaccountable by other means of proof. It should also be noted that non-perception of a sensible object generates the notion of negation immediately and not through other negations, and this is true not only of things of the present moment but also of the memory of past perceptions of non-existence, as when we remember that there was no jug here. Anupalabdhi is thus a separate pramāṇa by which the absence or want of a sensible object--the negation of a thing-can be comprehended.
Self, Salvation, God.
Mīmāmsā has to accept the existence of soul, for without it who would perform the Vedic commandments, and what would be the meaning of those Vedic texts which speak of men as performing sacrifices and going to Heaven thereby? The soul is thus regarded as something entirely distinct from the body, the sense organs, and buddhi; it is eternal, omnipresent, and many, one in each body. Prabhakara thinks that it is manifested to us in all cognitions. Indeed he makes this also a proof for the existence of self as a separate entity from the body, for had it not been so, why should we have the notion of self-persistence in all our cognitions—even in those where there is no perception of the body? Kumārila however differs from Prabhākara about this analysis of the consciousness of self in our cognitions, and says that even though we may not have any notion of the parts of our body or their specific combination, yet the notion of ourselves as embodied beings always appears in all our cognitions. Moreover in our cognitions of external objects we are not always conscious of the self as the knower; so it is not correct to say that self is different from the body on the ground that the consciousness of self is present in all our cognitions, and that the body is not cognized in many of our cognitions. But the true reason for admitting that the self is different from the body is this, that movement or willing, knowledge, pleasure, pain, etc., cannot be attributed to the body, for though the body exists at death these cannot then be found. So it has to be admitted that they must belong to some other entity owing to the association with which the body ap