On Being And What There Is Indian Perspectives On Question Of Being

SR No.: 269260
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Wilhelm Halbfass
Publisher: Wilhelm Halbfass
Total Pages: 15
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 2 MB

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Some Eastern Perspectives
casual; the triad "being, consciousness, bliss" (saccidānanda), a standard formula in later Vedānta, is not found in his authentic writings.15 And the theory of levels of discourse, truth, and reality, which permeates his thought and especially his interpretation of the sacred texts, is not systematically developed in terms of levels of being. 16 Sankara and numerous later Advaitins seem to be more interested in refuting false conceptions of being than in establishing their own view of the absolute in terms of being.
There are Vedāntins, however, who go much further than Sankara in thematizing and explicating being and in using it as a vehicle for the understanding of brahman. We hear about a tradition of sattādvaita, which identifies brahman or the non-dual principle of all reality as sattā, "beingness" (a term strictly avoided by Sankara).17 And Mandanamiśra, the great and influential outsider of classical Advaita, devotes special care to reexamining the notion of being and its applicability to brahman. “Pure beingness," sanmātra, is, e.g., interpreted as the one and all-pervasive content of immediate, non-relational, pre-predicative perception (nirvikalpakapraty: akşa); the supreme unity of all reality is thus presented as a given factor of perception, underlying all conceptualizing, particularizing, predicative perception, imagination, and thought. This is at the same time a rejoinder to the Buddhist theory of innumerable discontinuous and disparate "selfcharacterizers” (svalakṣaṇa) as data of pre-predicative perception, and it is one instance of the far-reaching dialectical relationship between Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism.18 On the doctrinal and terminological surface it is, of course, one of the most striking differences between Buddhism and Advaita that the Buddhists generally reject, avoid, or ridicule any theorizing in terms of being, with its connotations of self-nature, permanence, and self-sufficiency. 19
The Vaiseșika School Much of what Vedāntins and Buddhists, as well as representatives of several other systems, have to say about, against, or even in defiance of being is, in some sense, directly or indirectly related to conceptualizations of being as they are found in the Vaiseșika system and its sister-system, Nyāya. However narrow and insufficient these conceptualizations may be, they carry out, in a very instructive manner, certain exemplary conceptual procedures. Within the Indian context, they represent an exemplary target of criticism, and we may say that they play a catalytical role in the development of explicit and systematic thought about being in India.
The Vaiseșika system is usually labeled a "doctrine of categories," "category" being the traditionally accepted translation of the Sanskrit term padārtha. It is, in fact, an attempt to enumerate exhaustively the constituents of our world and to group them in certain highest classes.