________________
88
The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
perception -- a natural deduction from the homogeneity of cause and effect as propounded by the Buddhist.
A later Buddhist exponent has tried to meet the afore-mentioned criticism by his assertion that perceptual cognition alone is not the cause of the conceptual thought that arises in its trail. Perception together with the latent traces of previous conceptual thoughts, which are the legacy of similar previous experience, is responsible for the emergence of conceptual thought. So there is no departure from the law of homogeneity of cause and effect and the criticism of the Jaina philosopher does not invalidate the Buddhist's position. But if conceptual thought be the effect of like conceptual thought in the past psychological history of an individual and if there be no such thing as a first beginning in his career, the difficulty in the homogeneity of causation is avoided, no doubt; but it is not explained how such concepts, which have no connection with sense-intuition or with the objective datum which gives rise to such sense-intuition, can come to have any bearing upon perceptual experience. It is certainly held that these concepts are not generated by things-in-themselves (svalaksaņa). Whether these concepts are acquired from undated past experience, as the Buddhist would have us believe, or be immanent in our understanding as Kant maintains, it is left an inexplicable mystery how our perceptual judgments (adhyavasāya), to be more precise, the judgments generated by perceptual intuitions, should have a direct reference to external objects and to their mutual relationships. It is undeniable that these judgments are not like imaginary concepts unfounded on reality. The indeterminate simple intuition, which is truly cognisant of a real according to the Buddhist, is of no use unless it is determined by conceptual thought. The intuition of a chair, unless it is interpreted as intuition of a chair as an individual belonging to a class, does not enable us to affirm either the existence of the chair as a fact or of the intuition itself as the proof of it. The Jaina emphatically asserts that these concepts and conceptual thoughts are not in opposition either to the objective datum or to sense-intuition. If sense-intuition can be determined as having reference to an external datum only when clarified by concepts and conceptual thoughts, it is exceedingly difficult to understand why these concepts should not be of service in the
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
