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CHAPTER XXIX
CONTROVERSY BETWEEN THE DUALISTS
AND THE MONISTS
Vyāsa-tirtha, Madhusudana and Rāmācārya on the
Falsity of the World. The Vedāntists urge that the world-appearance is false. But before entering into any discussion about the nature of falsehood it is required that the Vedāntists should give a definition of falsehood. Five principal definitions have been adduced by the old Vedāntists; of these the first is that falsehood is that which is the absence of being as well as the absence of non-being (sattvātyantābhāvattve sati asattvātyantatā-bhāvavattva-rūpam višistam?). But Vyāsa-tīrtha urges that, since one of these is the negation of the other, joint assertion of them both will be against the Law of excluded middle and therefore will be self-contradictory; the fact that both being and non-being may be admitted independently is no reason for their joint admission (e.g., the hare and horn both exist separately, but the hare's horn exists nowhere). To this the reply of Madhusūdana is that the Law of excluded middle does not apply to every case of the relation between being and non-being. Thus the false-appearances have being so far as they appear and non-being so far as they are non-existent; exclusion of being does not necessarily lead us to non-being, and vice versa. To this the retort given by the author of Tarangini is that the Sankarites themselves say that, if a thing has no being, it cannot appear, which shows that they themselves admit the Law of excluded middle, the force of which can never be denied, as Logic amply demonstrates in the examination of any and every specific relation of being and non-being.
The second definition of falsehood by the Sankarites is that falsehood is that which can be denied at all times even where it appears to exist (prati-pannopādhu traikālika-nişedha-pratiyogitvam). To this Vyāsa-tīrtha says that, if the denial is true, then this true thing would exist side by side with Brahman and thus the
1 Nyāyāmýta, p. 22.
