Indian Logic Part 03

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

Page 10

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beanings as Kumaril Towers
merit of clearly recognising that words of a sentence yield their own respective meanings as well as the meaning of this sentence, a recognition in connection with which the Kumārilite has some reservations. Jayanta maintains that words of a sentence have two powers, viz. denotative power (abhidhātri sakti) and informative power (tātparyasakti); by the former power words yield their respective wordmeanings while by the latter power they yield the sentential meaning. Again, Jayanta makes the important observation that its denotative power a word exercises singly, while its informative power it exercises in company with the remaining words of a sentence; the Prabhākarite's mistake lies in denying the former power and applying the designation denotative power to the latter (the official Kumārilite position denies the latter power). Jayanta's exposition of the problem is illuminating.
Jayanta devotes Ahnika VII to the problem of soul. On the question of soul Indian philosophers were divided into three distinct camps - one represented by the Carvakas advocating outright materialism, another by the Buddhists advocating the anti-materialist doctrine of no-soul, the third by the rest (including the Naiyāyikas and the Mimamsakas) advocating the anti-materialist doctrine of soul. The fundamental question that served to divide the materialist from the anti-materialist was whether consciousness can be treated as a property of matter, a question answered in the affirmative by the former, in the negative by the latter. The latter simply argued that if consciousness be a property of matter then all matter should exhibit this property; the materialist's submission that matter organised in a particular fashion is what alone possesses consciousness was rejected as unwarranted. Jayanta's preoccupation with materialist position leads him to say a few things about transmigration and rebirth, for the materialists' deny them. In this connection Jayanta recalls that the Nyāyasūtra aphorist has argued in support of rebirth on the ground that even a new-born babe expresses joy or softow, an expression impossible in the absence of a past experience associated with joy or sorrow. The materialist rejects this argument, offering his own explanation of the phenomenon. Jayanta's, anti-materialist critique closes with the submission that certain happenings pertaining to the life of a living being remain unexplained in terms of observable factors related to this life, this necessitating the positing of karma-done-in-a-previous-birth (adrsta) as the needed explanatory factor. The Mināṁsakas and certain Naiyāyikas seek to answer the materialist by arguing that soul. is an object of direct perception. Jayanta himself is of the view that soul is known not by way of direct perception but by way of inference and so he criticises the argument in question as offered by the Kumārilite, the Prabhakarite and certain Naiyāyikas themselves. The criticism is sound and interesting. According to Jayanta the phenomena of recognition, desire, aversion and effort necessitate the positing of a soul in the form of an abiding non-bodily agent which on the one hand acquires fresh-cognition and on the other hand applies to new cases a cognition acquired in the past. The noteworthy thing is that this aspect of the matter so much emphasised by Jayanta as by the other non-Buddhist anti-materialist philosophers in the interest of the soul doctrine is an extremely significant aspect of the matter. As against this, the Buddhist conceived the conscious acts in the form of a series running parallel to the body series concerned, rejecting an abiding soul inhabiting the body concerned. This clearly suggests that the controversy around the Buddhist doctrine of no-soul was basically a controversy around the general doctrine of momentarism whose one corollary the former doctrine was. So Jayanta undertakes refutation of momentarism, which is brilliant in its own way: While assailing the doctrine of no-soul, he has made the following chief points: (1) Co-ordination