Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 52

Some Clarifications
43
there is between them is only verbal. And this is exactly what the Advaitin has claimed : all distinction between self (ātman) and pure consciousness (cit)—between knower (jñātā ) and knowledge (jñāna )—is verbal.
So far as the relation between the substantive being and the functional pure consciousness is concerned, the Spinozists (and with them may be grouped some schools of Saivism ) hold the same view. They differ only with regard to the relation between consciousness (subjectivity) and objects. As distinct from most of the Indian trancendentalists, they hold that subjectivity and object, and, therefore, grades of either, are parallel functions in Spinozistic language, attributes) of the same substantive being.
It may be noted, however, that though it is wrong to speak of a self or knower behind pure consciousness 5, such use would not be out of order if the knowledge in relation to which the self is to be called knower be only mental states (citta-vritis), not pure consciousness. Mental states, we have seen, are not subjective in the proper sense of the term. Subjectivity proper is but pure subjectivity which, though realized first as individual pure subjectivity (jīva-sāksin), is really pure consciousness itself just delimited. It is to this pure consciousness as delimited that appropriate mental states and, through them, bodily and extra-bodily affairs-stand as objects, which means that in that respect it is their subject. Pure consciousness can in this sense be called knower. But at the same time, and exactly in the same sense, it is its knowledge too. As, therefore, the context and the sense remain the same, it matters little whether one calls pure consciousness knower or knowledge of everything else. In any case, there is no distinction here between substance and a feature that could be predicated of it.
5
For all Indian transcendentalists pure consciousness (subjectivity) and knowledge proper are one and the same thing. Why it is so will be evident as we proceed.
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