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x111] Springs of action in the Caraka-samhitā 415 judged as good or bad according as they lead to liberation or bondage; their efficacy is in securing the transcendental realization of the highest truth and the cessation of rebirth, or obscuration of the nature of reality and exposure to the miseries of rebirth.
But Caraka gives us a scheme of life in which he traces the springs of all our actions to the three fundamental motives or biological instincts of life-preservation, worldly desire of acquiring riches for enjoyment, and other worldly aspirations of self-realization. According to him these three fundamental desires sum up all springs of action. On this view will appears to be more fundamental than feeling or knowledge. Caraka does not seem to begin from the old and stereotyped idea that false knowledge is the starting-point of the world. His is a scheme of a well-balanced life which is guided by the harmonious play of these three fundamental desires and directed by perfect wisdom and unerring judgment. Evil and mischlef creep in through errors of judgment, by which the harmony of these desires is broken. All kinds of misdeeds are traced, not to feelings of attachment or antipathy, but to errors of judgment or foolishness (prajñāparādha). This prajñāparādha may be compared to the moha or avidyā of the Nyāya and Yoga. But, while the Nyāya and Yoga seem to refer to this moha or avidyā as a fundamental defect inherent in our mental constitution and determining its activities as a formative element, Caraka's prajñāparādha is not made to occupy any metaphysical status, but expresses itself only in the individual lapses of judgment.
Caraka, however, did not dare to come into conflict with the prevailing ethical and philosophical opinions of his time, and we find that in Sārīra, i he largely accepts the traditional views. He says there that it is the phenomenal self (bhūtātman or samyogapuruṣa) that feels pleasure and pain, and in connection with the duty of a physician to remove all physical sufferings produced by diseases he says that the ultimate healing of all pain consists in the permanent naisthiki (removal) of pain by the removal of grasping (upadhā)”. He says there that grasping (upadhā) is itself sorrowful and the cause of all sorrows. All sorrows can be removed by the removal of all grasping tendencies. Just as a silkworm draws out its cocoon thread to its own destruction, so does
1 Cakrapāņi interprets upadha as desire (trsnā); but it seems to me that it would have been more correct to interpret it as the Buddhist upādāna, or grasping. Cakrapāņi on Caraka, IV. I. 93.
