________________
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
203
so anomalous a procedure, but that there was something essentially extralogical about them seems certain, for otherwise it remains incomprehensible why the master-logician should indulge in the wanton game of intellectual suicide. Within the Buddhist camp idealism was certainly a Mahāyāna novelty, but realism was as old as Buddha himself and its latest outstanding defence had come from the Sautrāntika school. So in defending idealism Dharmakirti was perhaps only paying homage to the fashion of the day, but when the question was of raising a well-constituted edifice of logical doctrine he based himself on the solid ground of Sautrāntika realism. But then the realist position itself suffered from an inherent difficulty which idealists exploited to the full. The difficulty pertained to the problem of envisaging a tangible relationship between a piece of cognition and the physical object that serves as its object. If, as was maintained by the realist, cognition and things physical belong to two different realms of reality, it is really difficult to see how the two stand related to each other. The idealist came out with the argument that since all that we know of physical things we know through cognition, there is no warrant to suppose that there at all exist physical things independent of cognition. This was a wreckless solution of a genuinely difficult problem, but the realist alternative virtually amounted to confessing that the relation between cognition and things physical is a relation sui generis, an alternative equally suspect. So the controversy went on and on. It is not accidental that in the discussion noticed by us in the beginning of the present investigation, Dharmakirti deserted the realist position only when he realised that there was something essentially enigmatic about the relation alleged to obtain between a piece of cognition and its object. And in his subsequent defence of idealism he adopts the usual idealist practice of taking full advantage of the very difficulty here brought to light. So Dharmakirti the logician's account of cognition as such deserves some further consideration.
Dharmakirti has attributed to cognition two essential characteristics, viz. (1) its bearing the form of the object concerned and (2) its cognising itself. Now cognition being ex hypothesi something nonphysical and its object being something physical it has to be admitted that cognition can bear the form of its object only in some figurative sense, the net import of Dharmakirti's thesis being that a piece of cognition must possess some such characteristicas makes it the cognition of this object rather than that; and as thus put, the thesis is
