Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 53

III
THE WORLD OF REALITY
THERE is nothing to show that the question of the reality of the world had ever occurred to the framers of the Mimāriesā Sūtra, but in Sabarasvamin's Bhasya we find the problema definitely faced in answer to the onslaught made by the Nihilist school of Buddhism on the whole conception of the reality of existence as we know it. The doctrine of Nāgárjuna,' doubtless an effective restatement of tendencies earlier manifested in the Buddhist schools, denies at once the reality of the external world, and of the ideal world which seems to present us with the knowledge of external reality. That much of its dialectic is sophistic is true, but its novelty of view and the energy with which Nāgārjuna, an eastern parallel of Zeno, urged his paradoxes, evoked from the orthodox schools elaborate replies, both the Nyāyu and the Vedāntu Sätras seeking to refute heresies so dangerous to their own tenets, The reply of the Minārsā, in keeping with what appears to be the early character of that Sūtra as compared with the Vedānta or Nyāya Sutras is given only in the Vrttikāra as cited in the Bhasya.? An opponent objects, in his version, to the validity of our waking perceptions, on the ground that in a dream we have cognitions which all admit to be without foundation, and, if this is true of one set of cognitions, it may be assumed to be equally true of another. The reply of the Vrttikära is, in effect, that the argument assumes what is to be
1 Mulamadhyamakakārikā, ed. Bibliotheca Buddhica, 1903-1913, Max Walleger, Die Mittlere Lehre des Nāgārjuna, Heidelberg, 1911 and 1912. Cf. Sarvadarsanasargraha, ch. II; Sarvasiddhantasangraha, ch IV.
1 Pp. 8-10.