Indian Logic Part 02

Author(s): Nagin J Shah
Publisher: Sanskrit Sanskriti Granthmala

Page 24

PERCEPTION
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can the relation of concomitance be established between a perceptual cognition and its object when the two are never grasped apart from one another ?"Jayanta replies : “To notice that a perceptual cognition never arises unless its object is present there is to grasp the two apart from one another; (this idealist objection will be considered in details later on)."'34 To this is added that an object is proved to be a cause of perceptual cognition exactly in the same manner as a sense-organ is proved to be such a cause, that is, on the basis of concomitancein-presence and concomitance-in-absence.35 Lastly the opponent objects : “But this definition of perception fails to cover the cases of perception having pleasure etc. for its object”; Jayanta replies : “Pleasure.etc. are grasped through manas which too is a sense-organ though not of the physical type.”36 The topic is closed by observing that in the case of the perception of a physical object there take place three conjunctions, viz.
(1) that of the cognizer soul with its manas, (2) that of this manas with a sense-organ, (3) that of this sense-organ with its object.
In the case of the perception of pleasure etc. there take place the first two of these conjunctions, in the case of a yogin's perception of his soul there takes place just the first of these conjunctions. This introduces us to the basic circle of ideas that interested a Naiyāyika in connection with the problem of perceptual cognition; an assessment of these ideas remains to be made.
As can be easily seen, the Naiyāyika chiefly concentrates on describing as to how many types of object there are to be perceived and how many types of contact there are to take place between a senseorgan and an object. But this virtually amounts to expressing in the technical terminology of the Nyāya school (rather, that of the Vaišeşika school whose specialized findings in the field of ontology the Naiyāyika borrows almost wholesale) the simple fact that a thing becomes an object of perceptual cognition as a result of coming in contact with an appropriate sense-organ. That is to say, here there is involved no deeper analysis of what perceptual cognition consists in, an analysis which should reveal that it consists in first observing certain sensory features of a thing and then using these features as a signal to identify this thing as belonging to this class or that. Of such an analysis rudiments at least are clearly formulated by the Buddhist with his