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ON THE PROBLEM QF JNANA-DARŠANA
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and the same principle (tattva). Hence they attributed the faculty of seeing to purusa and the faculty of knowing to citta. Even Buddha and the Buddhists regard them as fundamentally different faculties, but they do not consider them to be so fundamentally different that they could not be attributed to one and the same principle (tattva). Hence they attributed both these faculties to one and the same principle, viz. citta, rejecting purusa (= ātman) altogether.
Again, Buddha and the Buddhists might have thought if jñāna (knowing), karma, klesa, bandha as also jñānāvarana, karmāvarana, klešāvarana and mokṣa belong to citta, then why should one not recognise citta alone and attribute to it even the faculty of seeing for which alone Sankhya-Yoga thinkers recognise a separate tattva, viz. puruşa ? They thought puruşa is metaphysically rather ethically useless. So, they totally rejected puruşa, and attributed the faculty of seeing to citta.
We are reminded here of the view that the original Sāńkhya accepted only 24 tattvas among which puruşa finds no place. This makes us think as follows: In the time of Upanisads ātman tradition became very strong. We are told that ātman is a principle even greater than buddhi (== citta) (buddher ātmā mahān parah-Kathopanisasd). Under the strong influence of the ātman tradition the later Sankhya-Yoga philosophy made room for purusa in the system; not only that but it accorded the highest place in the hierarchy of tattvas. But if we study the Sānkhya of 25 tattvas we feel that puruşa is only an appendix, it is not an integral part of the system, the role it is assigned to play is quite negligible. The Buddha and the Buddhists seem to have realised this fact, hence they might have re-established in its original pristine state the anātma tradition which got corrupted, so to say, by the ātman tradition of the Upanişads, or, in Buddhism we find a branch of original anātma tradition, remaining uncorrupted by ātman tỉadition and attacking ātman tradition severely. This seems to me to be the true significance of Buddhist anātmavāda. (We can say almost all this even in connection with the Jainas. The Buddhist rejected even the term ātman (purusa) with the rejection of ātma-tattva. But the Jainas accepted the term ātman even though they rejected ātman-tattva. They applied this term to the citta-tattva. Doing so they created an illusion that they really belong to the ātman tradition. We reserve the full discussion on this point for the next section on Jainism).
