Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 57

48
THE KARMA-MIMAMSĀ
anderlies cognitions as a whole. Moreover, in dream cognitions, which you adduce as examples where there is no underlying reality, we find on examination that there is always a real substratum, however much distorted and disguised. If, again, you argue that the unreality of our waking cognitions is revealed by the fact that the Yogin sees reality far otherwise, we retort by denying the validity of his perception, and cicing against him the visions of our Yogins. Nor can we accept the arguments of the Buddhist logicians, such as Dignāga, who assert that the activity of the mind can supply the full complement of nolions, which appear to us to reflect reality;? without an external world all these mental conceptions would be meapingless, for we deal not with conceptions, but with the facts of life.
Against the conception that cognition alone exists to the exclusion of cogniser and cognised, Kumārila contends with special energy. The case for this conception is set out by him with much care as the prelude to his reply to the Sünyavāda. It rests on the difficulty of understanding how cognition and cognised can be related. There cannot really be two entities, anie formless and one possessing form, for in memory, when no object is present, we still have cognition of form, showing that the cognition has form, and rendering the hypothesis of an external reality mere superfluity. How, again, can there be contact between the incorporeal cognition and the external object ? An object can be perceived only if it has form, but again the form does not exist until it is perceived, which involves contradiction. Again, even if contact were possible, how could two things, in themselves without form, acquire it in this way ? Moreover, the idea we have of a double moon is admittedly erroneous, and therefore cannot rest on reality. So also ive use a variety of words of varied gender for the stars, and a masculine word (darah) for a wife, which would be impossible if really controlled our ideas. The same thing, e.g, a lovely woman, raises very different feelings in the mind of the ascetic, the
: Cf. Ratnā karasänti's treatment of inference as internal only, Antarvyāptisamarthana (Six Buddhist Nyaya Tracts, pp. 103-14).