Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 54

Some Clarifications
45
The real situation here is, as we have repeatedly shown, that mental states (particularly those which are mistakenly called knowledge) are only a kind of phosphorescent objects with which pure subjectivity is found, on reflection (i.e. in introspection), to have been directly fused and from which, in introspection, it is straightaway distinguished out. Considered from the point of view of pure subjectivity, they constitute the first fused stage, and that is why every mental state is discovered, in introspection, as with pure subjectivity emerging and yet as an object and, therefore, also as a mode of
eference, reference being only another name for subjectivity and object alternating indeterminately.
The controversy as to whether mental states should or should not be called knowledge (or modes of consciousness) is not one of mere use of language. The linguistic problem is undoubtedly there, but what more is there—and that is the real intention of the Indian transcendentalists —is whether or not there is pure subjectivity behind mental states and what relation it bears to them.
The other group of thinkers ( suggested in p. 42 ) who recognise a substantive self behind mental states have taken it as itself something with an intrinsic nature of its own and with consciousness as an additional contingent character. The Nyāya-Vaišeșika thinker and the Rāmānujist are the best exponents of this view. The former has openly admitted that all conscious states (with him there is no single consciousness as such except as an abstract universal, adjectival to every conscious state) are contingent, each of them occasioned at a particular point of time and enduring for a limited period. 9 For him, therefore, the substance called self is intrinsically 7 Not in unreflective experience where it stands as an object, though
dissociated from some other object or objects. 8 When we are speaking of Indian transcedentalists, obviously we are
excluding the Buddhists. 9 With further details of this limited period we need not be concern
ed here.