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xxix] The World as Illusion
257 be difficult also to explain how, if the "this” which forms a basis of illusion is not already there outside us, there can be any senserelation to it and to the foundation of the illusory image. To this Madhusūdana's reply is that the ordinary explanation of illusion depending upon sense-relation and other conditions is only an explanation for people of the lower order. For people of the higher order the definition of illusion would be “the manifestation of a true entity in association with a false one," and such a definition would hold good even on the dysți-sęsti view. The consciousness underlying the “this" is a substance, and the false silver is manifested in association with it.
It is further objected that at the time of the illusory perception (“this is silver"), if there is no conch-shell as an objective fact, then the illusion cannot be explained, as is generally done, as effect of ignorance about the conch-shell. The reply is that, even if the conch-shell is absent, the ajñāna that forms its stuff is there. To the objection that the two perceptions "this is silver” and “this is not silver” are directed to two different perceptions and do not refer to one common objective fact, and that therefore neither of them can be regarded as the contradiction of the other, since such a contradiction is only possible when two affirmations refer to one and the same objective fact-the reply is that on the analogy of dream-experiences the contradiction is possible here also. Vysatirtha further says that, since the contradiction of an illusion is not an objective fact, but a mere perception, it has no better status than the illusory perception and therefore cannot be regarded as necessarily truer than the illusion which it is supposed to contradict. He further says that in dreamless sleep and in dissolution, since there is no differential perception as between Brahman and the jīva, such a difference between Brahman and the jīva ceases in each dreamless sleep and in each cyclic dissolution. Thus in the absence of difference between Brahman and the jīva there cannot be at the end of each dreamless sleep and dissolution any return to world-experience. In the case of a person who is sleeping and whose root-impressions on that account are not perceivable (and are therefore nonexistent), there is no explanation how the world-experience may again be started. Emancipation also, being only a perception, cannot have a better status of existence than the world-experience; moreover, if the pure consciousness appeared as all the world
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