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time. Thus, how can retention be defined as the condition of recall? We recollect our past experience on account of the special capacity of the soul to remember past events. The faculty of retention cannot be regarded as the cause of recollection. Retention, however, can be admitted as a remote cause of recall, and not as the immediate one, since it is not an impossibility to admit so many remote causes of an event. Hemacandra does not totally agree with this view. He supports the other view also. According to him, 'retention is the condition of recollection'.2 This condition is nothing but the causal stuff capable of change into the effect called recall that consists in the recollection of past events. To express the same idea in a different manner, retention is nothing but the latent mental trace left over as legacy by previous experience. It is, thus the continued existence of a particular perceptual judgment for a certain length of time. Hemacandra further remarks that this latent mental trace should be admitted as a species of cognition on the ground that it is a category of non-verbal comprehension. It should not be supposed that it is different from cognition as such, because if it were not cognitive in character, it could not produce recall which is a category of cognition. One kind of existence is impossible to be transformed into another kind of existence which is opposite in nature. If retention in the form of hidden mental trace were not cognitive in nature, it could not be an attribute of the self, inasmuch as the attribute of a conscious entity cannot be nonconscious in nature. Now, as regards the controversy between the two schools as to the nature of retention, Hemacandra tries to reconcile it. The older Jaina thinkers assert that the absence of lapse is also a case of retention. The following statement of the Višeşāvaśyaka-bhāsya 'the absence of lapse is retention' may be quoted in support. How then have you stated that the condition of recollection alone is retention? This is the problem that has been put before him, He gives the following answer: True, there is such a thing as absence of lapse which is called retention. But it is included within the fold of perception. This is the reason why it
1 Syādvāda-ratnākara, II, 10. 2 Smytiheturdhāraṇā.
Pramāņa-mimāṁsā, I, I, 29. 3 Commentary on Pramāņa-mimāṁsā, I, 1, 29.
