Enlightened Vision of the Self

Author(s): Akalankadev, Devendra K Goyal
Publisher: Radiant Publishers New Delhi

Page 27

FOREWORD
15
He who knows is knowledge (jo janadi so nanan); but the self does not by the help of its knowledge becomes something-that-isknowing (inayaka); knowledge evolves by itself, and all the objects reside in knowledge [in a certain way]24
Thus, Amrtachandra remarks, the forced supposition of a separation of knower and knowledge is superfluous.25 H. M. Bhattacharya also points out:
Knowledge to be of real significance must be regarded as identical with the soul, which in knowing only modifies itself into knowledge; there is no separation possible of any kind between the knower and its knowledge, the soul which is parinami cannot be regarded as something different from its parinama [evolution, change or modification). Knowledge as parinama is the soul knowing.25
The Sankhya postulates the pusha as the transcendental principle of intelligence to which the conscious modifications of the psychical centre, viz. perceptions and ideas, feelings of pleasure, pain and infatuation, volitions and strivings, never cling and are thus entirely foreign. It follows then that in the production of the knowledge or cognitive-situation, the prosa or the conscious principle has no role to play, nor is cognition by any means a conscious function seeing that the buddhi, intrinsically unconscious as an evolute of Prakriti, runs the whole show.27
This theory of the Self in relation to knowledge is rather odd and does not somehow appeal to common sense. Accordingly, the Jains find fault with the Sankhya position and argue as follows:
His [Samkhya] conception of the self as a static and unmodifying (aparinam) eternal principle which does not enter into the constitution of knowledge, but which merely looks on it from a distance as it arises, as a modification of an unconscious principle. This virtual separation between the self and knowledge (buddh) entails an actual stultification of each of them. For the Jaina points out, and rightly, that the self as a real, like every other real, realises