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 496

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Indefinable Nature of Ajñāna
479
that we get of it is always through manifestations of forms and names; these phenomenal forms and names are undefinable, incomprehensible, and unknowable in themselves, but under certain conditions they are manifested by the self-luminous real, and at the time they are so manifested they seem to have a positive being which is undeniable. This positive being is only the highest being, the real which appears as the being of those forms and names. A lump of clay may be moulded into a plate or a cup, but the plate-form or the cup-form has no existence or being apart from the being of the clay; it is the being of the clay that is imposed on the diverse forms which also then seem to have being in themselves. Our illusion thus consists in mutually misattributing the characteristics of the unreal forms-the modes of ajñāna and the real being. As this illusion is the mode of all our experience and its very essence, it is indeed difficult for us to conceive of the Brahman as apart from the modes of ajñāna. Moreover such is the nature of ajñānas that they are knowable only by a false identification of them with the self-luminous Brahman or ātman. Being as such is the highest truth, the Brahman. The ajñāna states are not non-being in the sense of nothing of pure negation (abhāva), but in the sense that they are not being. Being that is the self-luminous illuminates non-being, the ajñāna, and this illumination means nothing more than a false identification of being with non-being. The forms of ajñāna if they are to be known must be associated with pure consciousness, and this association means an illusion, superimposition, and mutual misattribution. But apart from pure consciousness these cannot be manifested or known, for it is pure consciousness alone that is self-luminous. Thus when we try to know the ajñāna states in themselves as apart from the ātman we fall in a dilemma, for knowledge means illusory superimposition or illusion, and when it is not knowledge they evidently cannot be known. Thus apart from its being a factor in our illusory experience no other kind of its existence is known to us. If ajñāna had been a nonentity altogether it could never come at all, if it were a positive entity then it would never cease to be; the ajñāna thus is a mysterious category midway between being and non-being and indefinable in every way; and it is on account of this that it is called tattványatvābhyām anirvācya or undefinable and undeterminable either as real or unreal. It is real in the sense that it is