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II ADIYAYA, 2 PÂDA, 28.
423
doctrine that a former idea leaves an impression giving rise to a later idea ; the doctrine of the distinction, owing to the influence of Nescience, of the attributes of existence and non-existence; the doctrine of bondage and release (depending on absence and presence of right knowledge).
Further, if you say that we are conscious of the idea, you must admit that we are also conscious of the external thing. And if you rejoin that we are conscious of the idea on its own account because it is of a luminous nature like a lamp, while the external thing is not so; we reply that by maintaining the idea to be illuminated by itself you make yourself guilty of an absurdity no less than if you said that fire burns itself. And at the same time you refuse to accept the common and altogether rational opinion that we are conscious of the external thing by means of the idea different from the thing! Indeed a proof of extraordinary philosophic insight I-It cannot, moreover, be asserted in any way that the idea apart from the thing is the object of our consciousness; for it is absurd to speak of a thing as the object of its own activity. Possibly you (the Bauddha) will rejoin that, if the idea is to be apprehended by something different from it, that something also must be apprehended by something different and so on ad infinitum. And, moreover, you will perhaps object that as each cognition is of an essentially illuminating nature like a lamp, the assumption of a further cognition is uncalled for; for as they are both equally illuminating the one cannot give light to the other.-But both these objections are unfounded. As the idea only is apprehended, and there is consequently no necessity to assume something to apprehend the Self which witnesses the idea is conscious of the idea), there results no regressus ad infinitum. And the witnessing Self and the idea are of an essentially different nature, and may therefore stand to each other in the relation of knowing subject and object known. The existence of the witness
For all these doctrines depend on the comparison of ideas which is not possible unless there be a permanent knowing subject in addition to the transitory ideas.
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