Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 55

A Modern Understanding of...
without consciousness, and we have seen that a hypothesis of this type is entirely useless. As for the Rāmānujist, he has not indeed held either that the substantive self is intrinsically without consciousness or that all consciousness is contingent. But he has distinguished between a type of consciousness which is intrinsic to the self and another which occasionally happens there and continues for a limited period of time. But this is only reminiscent of the distinction the Advaitin draws between pure subjectivity aud mental states. The Rāmānujist's intrinsic consciousness corresponds largely to the Advaitin's pure subjectivity and his contingent conscious to the latter's mental states. His only point of departure is that for him mental states are themselves states of consciousness, which, however, we have just seen, is a wrong notion. Mental states are not states of consciousness at all, whatever consciousness may be spoken of as having been there being only consciousness as undistinguishedly fused with them. The so-called contingent consciousness is not qualitatively of the same stuff with intrinsic consciousness. It is because the Rāmānujist has taken it as of the nature of consciousness that he calls it knowledge (jñāna) too, distinguished from intrinsic knowledge in being only attributive or secondary (dharmabhūta-jñāna), intrinsic knowledge being understood as constituting the very nature (svarupa) of the substantive self.
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The Nyaya-Vaiseṣika thinker, otherwise, agreeing with the Rāmānujist, differs with him sharply on this last point. He would never admit any intrinsic knowledge (consciousness) belonging to a substantive self: the substantive self is, according to him, without knowledge, without consciousness. Yet, however, the difference is not as fundamental as it appears to be. For despite all else he has said he understands the sub. stantive self as, after all, intrinsically capable of possessing consciousness (knowledge) and in that sense he is even prepared to call it conscious (cetana), At least this capability is then the svarupa of that self. Further, one could doubt if there is no eternal intrinsic knowledge in at least one self, viz. God.