Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

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THE KARMA-MIMAMSÃ
stant process of becoming and passing away, but they find no ground for the systematisation of the process, so as to produce cycles of evolution and involution of souls. Experience, Prabhākara urges, shows us the bodies of all animals being produced by purely natural means; we can argue hence to the facts of the past and the future, and need invoke no extraneous aid. Moreover, the whole conception of God supervising the merits and demerits of men is idle; God cannot perceive merit or demerit by perception, since they are not perceptible, nor by the mind, which is confined to the body which it occupies. Supervision also is impossible, even had God the necessary knowledge; it must take the form either of contact, which is impossible as merit and demerit being qualities are not subject to contact, or inherence, and plainly a man's qualities cannot inhere in God. If the argument is adduced of the analogy of the carpenter, it may be replied that on this basis the creator would have to be an ernbodied spirit, and no embodied spirit can affect such subtle things as the atoms or merit and demerit. Nor is it conceivable that the atoms should themselves act under the will of God, for no parallel to such activity is known to us, and, if it were possible, it would follow from the eternity of the will of God that creation would be unceasing. The only true case of supervision known to us is that exercised by the soul over the body, which it occupies by virtue of its merit or demerit, and there is no need to hold that the world is more than an ever-changing sequence of things affected by the souls in it.
Kumārila's treatment includes both an elaborate attack on the whole conception of creation and a special refutation of the Vaišeşika views. He ridicules the idea of the existence of Prajāpati before the creation of matter; without a a body, how could he feel desire ? If he possessed a body, then matter must have existed before his creative activity, and there is no reason to deny then the existence of other bodies. Nor is there any intelligible motive for creation, granted that, when the world exists, conditions are regulated by merit and demerit, originally there was no merit or demerit, and the creation of a world full of misery was inexcusable, for it is idle to argue that a creator could only