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NATURE AND FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
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thing other than what it is, the Nyāya theory of error is called anyathākhyāti or...viparītakhyāti. According to it, an erroneous cognition is presentational in character and bas some basis in facts But the facts being misplaced and misrelated, error becomes a false apprehension of the real.
The above view of anyathākhyāti is common to the Nyāya-Vaiseşika. It has been accepted in the main by Kumārıla, Rāmānuja' and the Jainas. But the Bauddha, the Prābhākara Mimāmsā and Advaita Vedānta systems oppose the Nyāya view and propose different theories. Hence the Navyāyikas proceed to repudiate the other theories of error. According to the Yogācāras, there is no extramental reality, and things are only thoughts or ideas. Realty is a stream of cognitions bifurcated into a subjective and an objective series. Error consists in an illegitimate process of projection of subjective ideas as objective and extra-mental facts. All cognition of objects thus objectifies the subjective and is therefore erroneous. This view is called ātmakhyātı or jñānākārakhyāti, since it insists on the sole reality of ideas and looks upon all objects as cognitions wrongly taken for external things.
This theory, however, the Naiyāyikas object, fails to account for the facts of the case. On the theory of subjective idealism of the Yogācāras, there is no difference between knowledge, and the subject and object of know
1 Rāmānuja bas proposed an alternative theory of illusion which is distinguished from the above as satkhvät. According to it, all cognitions are relatively true and none absolutely false. The cognition of silver in a shell is true with reference to the element of silver that is present in the shell In every object of the world the elements of all other objects are present in different proportions So in the structure of a shell an element of silver is present, although the shell element preponderates in it. Hence the cogoition of silver has an objective basis, and 18 so far true But owing to certain defects of the sense organs, there 18 a distortion of the shell element, and we have the perception of silver in what is really a silver-sbell Tho perception 18 wrong, not because it is the cognition of no fact or of the upreal, but because it 18 & partial view or an imperfect knowledge of the real. (Cf. Sribhäęya, 1.11)
