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84
Madhva and his School
[CH. cannot be ajñāna. From another point of view too it may be urged that the monists support an impossible proposition in saying that, when all the individuals are emancipated, the Brahman will be emancipated, since the living units or the souls are far more numerous than even the atoms; on the tip of an atom there may be millions of living units, and it is impossible to conceive that they should all attain salvation through the knowledge of Brahman. It also cannot be said that there is nothing to be surprised at the logical certainty of falsehood; for it must be a very strong argument against our opponent, that they cannot prove the falsehood of all things which are immediately and directly perceived; and, unless such proofs are available, things that are perceived through direct experience cannot be ignored. We all know that we are always enjoying the objects of the world in our experience, and in view of this fact how can we say that there is no difference between an experience and the object experienced? When we perceive our food, how can we say that there is no food? A perceptual experience can be discarded only when it is known that the conditions of perception were such as to vitiate its validity. We perceive a thing from a distance; we may mistrust it in certain respects, since we know that when we perceive a thing at a distance the object appears small and blurred; but, unless the possibility of such distorting conditions can be proved, no perception can be regarded as invalid. Moreover, the defects of a perception can also be discovered by a maturer perception. The falsehood of the world has never been proved as defective by any argument whatever. Moreover the experience of knowledge, ignorance, pleasure and pain cannot be contradicted; so it has to be admitted that the experience of the world is true, and, being true, it cannot be negated; therefore it is impossible to have such an emancipation as is desired by the monists. If that which is directly experienced can be negated merely by specious arguments without the testimony of a stronger experience, then even the perception of the self could be regarded as false. There is no lack of specious arguments about the existence of the self; for one may quite well argue that, since everything is false, the experience of the self also is
e, and there is no reason why we should distinguish the existence of other things from the experience of the self, since as experience they are of the same order. It will be an insupportable assumption that the experience of the self belongs to a different
