Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 33

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THE KARMA-MIMĀMSĀ
material or inherent cause, or in the material cause of that cause; thus, when by contact with the fire smell is generated in a substance, the immaterial cause is the contact with the fire, and the contact subsists in the substance itself, while, in the case of the colour of a mat, the colours of the yarns which cause the colour of the mat subsist in the yarns, which are the material cause of the mat. In the case of perception the soul is the material cause, and, as the squl is uncaused, the immaterial cause must subsist in it; in a substance, like the soul, only a quality can subsist, and therefore the immaterial cause of perception must be a quality of the soul, and this can only be some contact with an independent substance, just as the colour of the earth atom is produced by contact with fire. This independent substance cannot be all-pervading like space or time, contact with which is from their nature as all-pervading out of the question; it niust therefore be atomic, and the only substance which fulfils the necessary condition is mind, residing in the body ensouled by the self, and possessing the power of swift motion, by which it can form a rapid series of contacts, giving the appearance of simultaneity in our mental life The deduction is ingenious, but unconvincing; it is significant of the consciousness of the gap between the self and the body, which it seeks to bridge by the mediation of the atomic and therefore corporeal, but yet eternal substance, mind.
Of greater pbilosophical significance is the attitude of the school to the vexed question of the nature of perception as determinate or indeterminate (suvikalpaku or närvikalDaka). The Nyāya Sutra (I, 1, 4) poses the problem in its famous definition of perception as knowledge produced by the contact of the sense organ and the object, consisting of a determination which does not require definition by name (avyapadesya) and is not discrepant (avyabhicări). The precise of this declaration is far from certain, as the ambiguities of the commentors, Vātsyāyana, Uddyotakara, and Vācaspati Mišra, clearly show, but Dignāga and Dharmakirti developed a perfectly definite theory in which a clear distinction was drawn between the element of sense in perception and the function of imagination. In the narrowest sense perception is without imagination