Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 77

68
THE KARMA-MIMÄMSÄ
of the Samhitas and Brahmanas, the former of which implicitly, the latter explicitly, recognise the existence of the eternal soul.
There must, however, be something to mediate between the eternal and omnipresent soul and the world, else its knowledge would be eternal and omniscient, as emphatically it is not. The mediator is furnished by mind, whose contact with the soul is the essential condition for its consciousness in all its forms. For this contact it is necessary that mind should, in contrast to soul which is omnipresent, be atomic, and possess the capacity of extremely rapid motion, a fact which makes our experiences, even when truly successive as they are, appear on occasion to be simultaneous. Mind, however, can exist only in a body, which the soul must ensoul, and then through it the soul comes into contact with the outer world by means of the sense organs. Through the contact of external objects with the sense organs, mediated by the mind, the soul appreciates the outer world; the mind directly conveys to it knowledge of pleasure, pain, desire, aversion and effort, which are among its qualities. It possesses further qualities: cognition, which is self cognised in the terminology of Prabhakara or, as Kumarila has it, inferred; merit and demerit, which are inferred and impression (samskära), which is produced by apprehension and results in memory, from whose operations it is inferred. The principle of impression, moreover, really applies to merit and demerit, for these exist in the form of impressions of past activities, and can hardly be said to be separate qualities, since they merely sum up in terms of moral value the nature of the accumulated impressions; hence, though they appear as distinct elements in the Nyaya-Vaiseşika lists, one list of qualities attributed to Kumārila more logically leaves out merit and demerit. Further, the soul possesses the common qualities of number, namely, unity; individuality; dimension as omnipresent as opposed to atomic, or of the same size as the body as held by the Jains; and conjunction and disjunction with mind. Nothing is more bscure than this relation between the soul and the mind. It is said to be brought about by merit and demerit, but it is obvious
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