Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

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THE KARMA-MIMĀMSA
which the soul is cognised. In the view of Prabhākara the cognition is self-illumined, but this doctrine is not applicable to the soul. The Vedānta view, of course, insists on the doctrine of self-illumination in the case of the cognition and the soul as consciousness alike; Prabhākara objects that in this case the soul must be present in consciousness during the state of deep sleep no less than during the waking, dreaming and fourth states, and, as all our consciousness can be explained by hypothesis of the self-illumination of cognition, it is needless to assume any other self-luminous object. The Nyāya view, which makes the soul to be the object of direct perception, as opposed to the Vaisesika doctrine of the inferring of the soul, which is also found in older Nyāya, is rejected by Prabhākara on the ground that it serves to make the perceived also the perceiver, which is in his view absurd, a position for which there is clearly much better ground than in the cognate case of the denial of the mental perception of cognition. The theory which he adopts is, then, simply that in every cognition the soul enters into the cognition as a necessary element, and, therefore, in a sense the soul is cognised by the same means of valid cognition as the objects which it knows. But, while the soul is thus cognised, it is not cognised as a true object; it is cognised as the agent in cognition, just as a man who walks is the agent of walking, not the object. The soul, therefore, is the substratum of the self-illumined cognition, into which it enters in the element of “1." and this fact explains why in deep sleep there is no self-consciousness, since at that time there is no cognition, and the soul can be known only along with a cognition. But the fact that there is no cognition does not mean that there is no soul: consciousness is not, as in the Vedānta, the essence of the soul, but a mere quality of it, and in the state of liberation the soul remains eternally existent, though by ceasing to have cognitions it ceases to be cognised. While this view of the knowledge of the soul in self-consciousness is ingenious and not unhappy, laying as it does due stress on the necessary implication of the self in consciousness, it is a little difficult to see why Prabhākara did not admit that the soul was self-illumined, which iş certainly the natural interpretation of the Sabarabhāşya