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168 Philosophy of the Rāmānuja School of Thought [ch. his perception. No intuition is absolutely self-revealing. The experience of another man does not reveal anything to me, nor does a past experience of mine reveal anything to me now; for with reference to a past experience of mine I only say "I knew it so before," not "I know it now.” It is also not true that no experience can be further experienced; for I can remember my own past experience or can be aware of it, as I can be aware of the awareness of other persons; and, if the fact that one awareness can be the object of another would make it cease from being an experience or intuition (samtid or anubhūti), then there would be no anubhūti or experience at all. If a man could not be aware of the experiences of others, he could use no speech to express himself or understand the speech of other people, and all speech and language would be useless. That jug, etc., are not regarded as intuition or experience is simply because their nature is altogether different therefrom and not because they can be objects of cognition or experience; for that would be no criterion at all.
It is again urged that this intuition or experience (anubhūti or samvid) is never produced, since we do not know any stage when it was not in existence (prāg-abhāvādy-abhāvād utpattir nirasyate). It is also urged that any experience or awareness cannot reveal any state in which it did not exist; for how can a thing reveal its own absence, since it cannot exist at the time of its absence? Rāmānuja, in reply to such a contention on Sankara's side, debates why it should be considered necessary that an experience should reveal only that which existed at the same time with it; for, had it been so, there would be no communication of the past and the future. It is only sense-knowledge which reveals the objects which are existing at the time when the senses are operating and the sense-knowledge is existing; but this is not true with regard to all knowledge. Memory, inference, scriptures, and intuitive mystic cognition (yogi-pratyakşa) of sages can always communicate events which happened in the past or will happen in the future. Arguing in the same way, one could say that even in the case of the experience of ordinary objects such as jug, etc., it can be said that the perception which reveals their presence at any particular time does not reveal their existence at all times. That they are not so revealed means that the revelation of knowledge (samvid or anubhūti) is limited by time. If revelation of knowiedge were not itself limited in time, then the objects re
