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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
affiliation to reality and intuition of reality is only remote. But it is a fact that these modes of knowledge have each an objective reference, which is proved by verification to be veridical. If a remote intuition could determine the objective reference of such indirect modes of cognition, the difficulty would be avoided in the cases under consideration. But the solution would give rise to another problem. The intuition of yellow being remotely caused by the intuition of blue' should have the same reference with its cause. Thus, causality is found to have no influence upon the objective reference of pragmatic activity that follows from it.
Jñanaśrī however, complains that the Buddhist position has been misunderstood. The law of determination of objective reference by causality only relates to those cases of conceptual thought, which expose the being of intuition. Thus, only the determinate conceptual cognitions, which only expound and clarify a previous indeterminate intuition, are illustrative of the rule propounded by the Buddhist. Udayana observes that the nature of exposition (puraskār) requires to be clarified. If it meant that conception shared a common object with intuition, that would be untrue according to the Buddhist, who holds that conception is never in touch with the objective real. Nor can the meaning be that conception is felt to be identical with intuition. Intuition is free from ideation and has reference to the self-characterized particular real which is not amenable to verbal representation. But conception has exactly the opposite of these characteristics. So there can be no identification of the two. It may, again, be supposed that the validity of intuition is transposed to the conception which expounds its nature. But this transposition of validity is possible only if conception has reference to the selfsame real with intuition, because validity of knowledge is always determined by the reality of its object. The Buddhist cannot subscribe to the objective foundation of conceptual thought. As for the contention that conceptual cognition is cognisant of a fiction masquerading as a real, we have already shown the inherent contradiction involved in it.
It has been attempted to explain the apparent identity of objective reference by the theory of non-discrimination. It is asserted that conceptual cognition is not felt to be distinct from
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