Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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A Modern understanding...
tion between the form being dissociated and the old situation continuing exactly as it was before, there is none such between the subjectivity dissociated and the mental states continuing as they were experienced. Just, again, as in the case of dissociation of form the old situation is, from the point of view of this form, to be understood as somehow a function of the form, as the form itself in an updistinguished fused state-that state of fusion being a function of the form itself—so is the case with mental states from the point of view of the subjectivity dissociated. The transcended mental states have now to be understood as only its functions—either symbolic constructions as the Advaitin would have them or transcendental will-creations as other transcendentalists claim. What is true of the relation of pure subjectivity to the mental is true mutatis mutandis of its relation to the bodily. As for the relation between the mental and the bodily, it too is to be understood in the language of the relation between the subjective and the non-subjective, as a shadow, so to say, of this latter relation.
Granting all this, however, one may vet ask: Wherefrom could the actual detailed objects-actual details of mental and bodily states and of percepts come? Functions of subjectivity, whether as symbolic constructions or will creations, could at most be certain apriorities, not certainly the empirical variety one actually experiences. Transcendentalists in India, except probably the Buddhists, all hold, however, that there are more apriorities than the merely formal ones their Western couterparts have recog. nised. Space and time are certainly there, space standing for one aspect of body and time as of both the bodily and the mental, and there are of course logical apriorities as aspect of ideas or meanings in thought (in which, however, the Indian transcendentalists are not generally interested). In addition, however, they recognise qualitative apriorities like colour, taste, smell, etc. each of course in general only (tanmātras)- and also varieties of each inextricably associated with space (Mahābhūtas ),19 According 12 Some, of course, do not hold that mahabhūtas as mahabhūtas com
prise each a group of varieties a priori.