Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 78

GOD, THE SOUL, AND MATTER
69
that it is also affected by the activity of the soul, which is never regarded as merely passive in its attitude to mind The impossibility of expressing the relationship intelligibly is inherent in the effort to bridge the gulf between the material and the immaterial worlds. But it is curious that, as in the Nyāya-Vaišeşika, there is no real attempt in the Mīmāmsā to explain in what way mind is active in the processes of reasoning. It is obvious that inference, and the other means of proof apart from sense perception, must be due to the activity of mind in contact with the soul, but insistence on the part of mind in the direct perception of pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, and effort has apparently resulted in obscuring the essential part which it must be deemed to play in the higher mental activities, if for no other reason than that they all rest, save verbal cognition and negation, on sense perception as an ultimate basis, and eren verbal cognition and negation must be mediated to the soul by mind.
The soul, then, with the aid of the mind, is the enjoyer of all experience; the sense organs tlie instruments; the objects, external or internal, the world and the qualities of the soul; and the body is the abode of the sense organs and the mind, through whose instrumentality the soul has experience. Of bodies Prabhākara recognises three kinds only womb-born, egg-born and sweat-born-omitting, with some Nyāya-Vaišeşiķa authorities, the vegetable body, on the ground that its possession of sense organs is not established, despite the Jain views on this topic. None but earth bodies are accepted by Prabhākara, though the Nyāya-Vai esika accepts the existence in other worlds of water bodies, fire bodies and air bodies; this excludes the Vedānta view, which finds in the body five or three elements or the variant which admits of four only. The body, however, in any event is essentially subservient to the soul, which acquires a body in accordance with its past deeds, in what manner this is accomplished neither Prabhākara or Kumārila tell us, for in truth the problem is incomprehensible.
So far the views of Prabhākara and Kumārila seem to be in general barmony, but there is a distinct discrepancy, If not a very important one, in their view of the manner in