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xxx] Refutation of definition of Avidyā (nescience) 261 reference to such ignorance as has a beginning in time, as in the case of silver-illusion. So all that could be said would be that whatever opposes ignorance destroys it, and such a general statement has no special application to the case of the supposed beginningless ajñāna. Again, if ajñāna is regarded as different from positive entity, then it is like negation, and its cessation would mean position once more. Again, ajñāna (or ignorance) cannot have any existence apart from its perception, and, since ajñāna has always as its basis the pure consciousness, its perception can never be negative, so that it can never cease to exist?. Moreover, if ajñāna is false in the sense that it is non-existent in the locus in which it appears, it cannot be destroyed by knowledge. No one thinks that the illusory silver is destroyed by the perception of the conch-shell.
The second alternative definition of ajñāna is that it is the material cause of illusion. But according to the Sankarite theory that there are different ajñānas corresponding to the different jñānas, the knowledge of the conch-shell would remove ignorance of it, and the knowledge of a negation would remove ignorance of it; but in neither of these cases can ignorance be defined as a constituent of illusion. Negation, in itself, has no constituent material cause, and thus it cannot have ajñāna as a constituent.
There is a Sankarite view that māyā is the material cause of the world and Brahman is its locus. On such a view, māyā or ajñāna being the material cause of the world, and illusion (bhrama) being a part of the world, ajñāna becomes a constituent cause of bhrama, and not vice versa. On the other view, that both Brahma and māyā are causes of the world-appearance, māyā cannot by itself become the cause of illusion. Moreover, an illusion, being itself different from a positive entity, is more like negation and cannot have any constituent material of its own, and so it cannot itself be the constituent material of ajñāna. Moreover, on the Sankarite view, the illusory object, “having no being" (sad-vilakșanatvena), has no constituent, and so the illusory cannot be a constituent of ajñāna. If anything is to be a constituent of anything, it must be positively existing, and not merely different from non-existents. Again, whenever anything is a material stuff of other things, the former appears as a constant factor of the latter; but neither the illusory
pratiti-mătra-sarirasya ajiānasya yāoat soa-visaya-dhi-rupa-säkợi-sattvam anuurtti-niyamena nivịtty-ayogāc ca. Nyāyāmsta, p. 304.
