Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 58

THE WORLD OF REALITY
49
lover, and the dog. The same object appears to us in one aspect short, in the other long, and so forth. All this refutes the possibility of an external reality. The true theory is one suggested by the doctrine of impressions, which the Mimāmsā itself uses to explain memory and dream cogntion. There is one thing only, the cognition, but, as the result of impressions left by previous cognitions, there appears the distinction of cogniser, cognised, and cognition, in place of the unity. Each idea is momentary, but it can and does impress its successor; there is no substantial reality like the soul, but a never-ceasing series of momentary ideas, impressed each by the former, gives maa the semblances which we regard in ordinary life as the outer world and the soul.
The reply of Kumārila to this ingenious suggestion empirasises the impossibility of belief in the momentary character of ideas and the continuance which the theory requires. If each idea is really momentary, and perishes utterly, as the Buddhists assert, how can it affect the subsequent idea, contemporaneity of ideas being negated by the Buddhist theory? How, again, can impressions create new sensations, as opposed to mere reviving memories How can the essential distinction of cogniser and cognised be sublated ? How can each cognition in an interminable series contain in itself the whole of the past, when manifestly it does not make any attempt to do so? In what sense can our cognition, say of one animal, followed by that of another animal, be said to involve the conditioning of the second by the quite disparate first? We have many cognitions which are not the result of impressions at all. The only possible explanation of the unity and continuity of our mental life, lies in the recognition of a substantial unity in the self.
Kumarila insists that no idea can comprehend itself, and also that no idea can be comprehended by another, He rejects, therefore, not merely the Buddhist view but the Nyāya-Vaiseșika conception by which our ideas are the object of Mental perception, and the allied Sautrāntika?
Saddarsanasamiccaya, p. 47; Sarrasiddhantasaingraha, IV, !, 1-7,