Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

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THE KARMA-MIMAMSA
then they would possess intelligence, and rebirth would become impossible, since on their destruction intelligence would go also; further, the share played by the organs in developing the idea would contradict the Buddhist doctrine that the idea arises from a preceding idea only. Nor is there any evidence that the first cognition of the newborn child is due to a previous idea; we hold that it arises from the functioning of the sense organs. There must, therefore, be something which possesses the potentiality of ideas, is eternal, and capable of transmigration. This need is furnished by the soul, which is immaterial and omnipresent, and thus, without motion, is able to connect itself with one body after another.
The soul, then, is essentially active, for, unlike the Vaisesika school, the Mīmārsã does not, according to Kumārila, deem that motion is the only form of action, and it is through its superintending activity that the motions of the body are achieved. We must, therefore, conceive the soul engaged from time immemorial in the work of directing a body, the acts done in each life determining the character of the body attained in the next, a process which will cease only, if ever, when the soul ceases to obtain a bodily habitation.
Again, from another point of view the Buddhist conception of a series is imperfect. Granted that it is impossible to establish a soul merely on the ground of such attributes of the soul as pleasure, desire, or memory, adduced by the Vaišeşika school as indications of the existence of the soul, since these might be explained on the theory of impressions, no such explanation is available to dispose of the cognition of the self. In the case of the two judgments, "I knew" and "I know," the theory of ideas breaks completely down. The first idea cannot, as past, know the later idea, nor can the later idea know the first. It is useless to appeal to a series, for the series was not present at the first cognition, nor is it present at the last. Nor is there any unity in the two cognitions, for the Buddhist refuses to recognise any classes. Nor can it be argued that similarity would suffice, for in cognitions of different objects, e.g, a horse and a cow, there is no similarity of cognition. The bare fact of each