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Main Points at Issue Regarding Views on God
an act or reaping the frult thereof. Thus the latter are of the view that when an act performed reaches maturity it yields its own fruit itself and on account of a capacity inherent in itself-so that the entire world-diversity is due to the acts performed by the mass of living beings.11 The same role which full-fledged actorship on the part of prakṛti plays in the Sankhya tradition is played in the Jaina and Buddhist traditions by actorship on the part of a soul or citta.
The Main Points at Issue in the so far Mentioned Views Regarding God
Before we consider the position as to God adopted by the Upanisadic systems advocating the doctrine of Brahman it is necessary to clinch the main points that have arisen in the course of the above discussion perta. ining to the different other systems--so that it might be easy to understand as to how far and in what form the same points make their appearance in connection with the position adopted by the Upanisadic systems. Thus when the Nyaya-Vaiseṣika, Pāśupata-Māheśvara, Sankhya-Yoga and Ma. dhya treat God as a creator of the world their position first of all presupposes that he is only an occasioning or presiding cause of the world and not also its material-cause. And such a creatorship or occasional-causalship too is according to some something dependent on the acts performed by the living beings, according to others something independent of such acts. And while demonstrating such a creatorship some chiefly take recourse to inference and then seek nspport from scripture, others chiefly bas ing themselves on scripture treat reasoning as a mere buttressing-factor. As for the Sankhya-Yoga positing twenty-six elements, even when it calls God a particular type of soul He is supposed to assume the role of one who gets people out of difficult contingencies only insofar as He receives support from the supreme type of sattva-guna while in the absence of such a support He is incapable of doing anything on his own.
As for the Sankhya positing twenty-four or twenty-five elements, he attributes actorship and controllership to the Original Prakṛti alone. Acting independently it is prakṛti which acts with a view to serving the purposes of a soul; hence it is as much an efficient-cause of the world as it is its material-cause. Whatever good or evil act is performed by a buddhi yields its fruit automatically as soon as the time is ripe for that. 12 This does not
11 Karmajam lokavaicitryam.
-Abhidharmakosa 4.1
12 The account of a karmasaya (accumulated mass of karmans) and its fruition which we come across in the aphorisms 12-14 of the second chapter of Yogasutra makes one incline to think that what is described here is a karman's capacity-to-yieldfruit as posited by the Sankhya-Yoga tradition. That is why in connection with
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