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106
INDIAN LOGIC
of the basic difficulty these philosophers had with the Buddhist position. Thus for one thing they saw nothing incongruous about a thing being eternal in the sense of being beginningless and endless, nor could they see why a non-eternal thing must be momentary. But the noteworthy thing is that they too granted that non-eternal thing must be not only a caused something but also a perishing something; in other words, in their eyes too it was a valid generalisation that whatever is a caused entity is a perishing entity. However, they did not pause to consider the implications of this momentous generalisation, implications which constitute the bedrock of the Buddhist's thesis on momentarism. Thus characteristic is Jayanta's reaction to the Buddhist's submission that if a caused thing like a jar does not perish as soon as it is born then it might well be that it never perishes at all; poking fun at the Buddhist Jayanta sermonises : “Heavens would not fall if an humble thing like a jar does not perish. Moreover, a thing like a jar which is made up of parts must disintegrate sooner or later. After all, even jars used for Lord Rāma's coronation, since they are not seen there today, must have perished somehow or other.”35 All this makes Jayanta's refutation of momentarism - brilliant in its own way - so much of a misconceived performance. Be that as it may, he first presents the Buddhist's side of the story and then his own criticism of it, in both cases mostly confining his attention to the doctrine of momentarism while briefly touching upon the doctrine of no-soul - towards the beginning in the former case, towards the end in the latter. Let us consider the two one by one.
The Buddhist begins by pleading that there is no use positing a soul when the concept of momentary cognitions un-seated in a permanent locus will do as well, also suggesting that the mental states like desire, aversion etc. too are of the form of a type of cognition.36 As for memory etc. which necessarily require the 'coordination of a present cognition and an earlier one, they are declared to be possible by supposing that in the case of the cognitions constituting one series an outgoing one leaves an appropriate 'impression' in the incoming one, the conveying of an 'impression from a past cognition to a present one being likened to the conveying of red colour from a cotton-seed to the cotton borne by the plant born of this seed. 97 Lastly, it is contended that a so-called soul can in no way be affected by the occasional
