Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 51

A Modero Understanding of...
Those who hold that there is a substance, called knower or agent, or whom consciousness can be predicated adjectivally as a feature, have understood by this substance either the mere being the mere existence, the that only-of consci. ousness, consciousness as such being utiderstood as the mere what, or itself an existent thing with its own being, on the one hand, and its own intrinsic nature (svarūpa), on the other, as two distinct sides, consciousness forming only an additional character of it. In this latter alternative, consciousness, obviously, is a contingent character of that substance.
The Saivas and the sāktas in India and the Spinozists in the West advocate the former view. Many Śaivas and Śāktas have held that pure consciousness is only a function or power, and the substantive behind it is just pure being which weilds that function or has that power. The substantive is the being of that function, that which makes that function an existent affair. It follows that the function as such-the function without being, something which is a function and yet not an existent affair-is but a power of that substantive. But if the substance here is that which makes the power something existing and that power, as power, does not refer to the substance-in our present case, is without being—the two are only two aspects of one and the same situation and are, as such, like burning power and the fire that has that power, hardly two distinct ontological entities. Fire and that burning power are not merely not two physically separate entities, they are not even distinct conceptually, 'distinct' meaning that each is pinpointedly distinguishable, and, of course, addable to one another. Fire and burning power are neither of them definable without reference to the other. Of neither, again, can there be even a definition by type suggesting that in some ideal situa. tion fire could be defined without reference to burning power and vice versa. Thus, there is no ground whatsoever for calling them two entities, though it is a fact at the same time that we do call them two, which means that all the distinction
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The concept of self as agent ve may have an occasion to discuss later.