Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 56

THE WORLD OF REALITY
but it supplemented the conclusions it arrived at regarding external reality by demolishing the value of our ideas. Any reply to the Sunyavāda inust therefore include an answer which would apply to the Vijñānavāda, and later authors like Kunărila naturally thought that the discussion must deal with the more recent and more convincing school of Vijñänavāda. But the Vrttikāra shows, no knowledge of the peculiar terminology of the Vijñānavāda, such as its distinction between the Alajavijñāna, the quasi-permanent consciousness which constitutes the individual until he attains Nirvāṇa, and the particular presentations which are thence derived pravrtti-vijñāna). Moreover, the argument from the dream condition is not peculiar to the Vijñänavāda; on the contrary it is a special favourite of the Madhyamikas, occurring in the Madhyamika Sutra (VII, 34) and in other texts cited in the Vrtti on that text.
The view of Prabhākara is in accord with the Vrttikāra and the Bhasya, but Kumārila's interpretation of the passage has the advantage of eliciting from him a most interesting exposition of, and attack upon, the Buddhist Vijñānavāda and Sūnyavāda theories. The discussion shows the close affinity of the two doctrines, and the form of the argument is often complicated by the resort to elaborate syllogistic reasoning, but the whole makes a very creditable effort to refute either the extreme scepticism of the Madhyamika or the extreme idealism of the Yogācāras. The reality of an external world is vehemently insisted upon as the only foundation of the common facts of life, including such distinctions as those of virtue and vice, teacher and pupil. If there were nothing but ideas, all our views would be false, since they essentially rest on the belief in external reality. Moreover, there is a complete counter argument, cognitions, we hold, have real substrata in the external world; this notion of ours is correct, because it is without contradiction, like the notion of the falsity of dream cognition. If you reply by denying the validity of the probative example which we adduce, then the doctrine that dream cognitions are false would disappear, and you would lose the chief argument adduced against the reality which