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Ultimate goal
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and nirvāṇa is that in which all root desires (vāsanā) manifesting themselves in knowledge are destroyed and the mind with knowledge and perceptions, making false creations, ceases to work. This cannot be called death, for it will not have any rebirth and it cannot be called destruction, for only compounded things (sainskrta) suffer destruction, so that it is different from either death or destruction. This nirvana is different from that of the śrāvakas and the pratyekabuddhas for they are satisfied to call that state niryāna, in which by the knowledge of the general characteristics of all things (transitoriness and misery) they are not attached to things and cease to make erroneous judgments?
Thus we see that there is no cause (in the sense of ground) of all these phenomena as other heretics maintain. When it is said that the world is māyā or illusion, what is meant to be emphasized is this, that there is no cause, no ground. The phenomena that seem to originate, stay, and be destroyed are mere constructions of tainted imagination, and the tathatā or thatness is nothing but the turning away of this constructive activity or nature of the imagination (vikalpa) tainted with the associations of beginningless root desires (vāsanā)? The tathatā has no separate reality from illusion, but it is illusion itself when the course of the construction of illusion has ceased. It is therefore also spoken of as that which is cut off or detached from the mind (cittavimukta), for here there is no construction of imagination (sarvakalpanāvirahitam)3.
Sautrāntika Theory of Perception. Dharmottara (847 A.D.), a commentator of Dharmakīrtti's (about 635 A.D.) Nyāyabindu, a Sautrāntika logical and epistemological work, describes right knowledge (samyagjñāna) as an invariable antecedent to the accomplishment of all that a man
i Lankavatārasūtra, p. 100.
2 lbid. p. 109. 3 This account of the Vijñānavāda school is collected mainly from Lankavatārasūtra, as no other authentic work of the Vijñānavāda school is available. Hindu accounts and criticisms of this school may be had in such books as Kumarila's Sloka vārttika or Sankara's bhāsya, 11. ii, etc. Asanga's Mahāyānasūtrālamkāra deals more with the duties concerning the career of a saint (Bodhisattva) than with the metaphysics of the system.
- Dharmakīrtti calls himself an adherent of Vijñānavāda in his Santunintarasiddhi, a treatise on solipsism, but his Nyayabindu seems rightly to have been considered by the author of Nyāyabinduțīkātippani (p. 19) as being written from the Sautrāntika point of view.
