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XXIX] Nature of Knowledge
245 there is one ajñāna, the perception of one object ought to lead to immediate emancipation.
The criticism that, since knowledge must necessarily dispel ignorance, the illusion of silver cannot be destroyed, is invalid; for knowledge destroys ignorance only in the last instance, i.e., only before emancipation. The knowledge of the conch-shell cannot destroy the supreme veiling power of the root ajñāna covering the unlimited consciousness, but can only remove the relative ajñāna covering the limited consciousness, thereby opening up the consciousness underlying the limited object-forms, and so producing the contradiction of the illusory silver and the intuition of the conch-shell.
The objection that ajñāna cannot veil the material objects, because they are not luminous, is quite beside the point; for the Sankarite theory does not assume that the ajñāna veils the material objects. Their view is that the veiling relates to the pure consciousness on which all material objects are illusorily imposed. The ajñāna veiling the underlying consciousness veils also the material objects the existence of which depends on it, being an imposition upon it. When by the vștti the ground-consciousness of an object is manifested, the result is not the manifestation of the pure consciousness as such, but of the limited consciousness only so far as concerns its limited form with which the výtti is in contact. Thus the objection that either the removal of the veil is unnecessary or that in any particular cognition it necessarily implies emancipation is invalid.
Again, the states of the ignorance must be regarded as being identical with it, and the knowledge that is opposed to ignorance is also opposed to them; so the states of ajñāna can very well be directly removed by knowledge. The objection that there are many ajñānas, and that even if one ajñāna is removed there would be others obstructing the manifestation of cognition, is invalid; for, when one ajñāna is removed, its very removal is an obstruction to the spread of other ajñānas to veil the manifestation, so that, so long as the first ajñāna remains removed, the manifestation of the object continues.
An objection is put forward that, the consciousness being itself partless, there cannot be any manifestation of it in part, with re
ence to certain object-forms only. If it is held that such conditioned manifestation is possible with reference to the conditioning
