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264 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY attainment of happiness, but in the removal of pain. The removal, being a dhvarsa or 'posterior negation,' will endure ever afterwards and no lapse from that condition will take place. Such an ideal is quite operative, for, according to the Nyāya-Vaiseşika, conative activity is prompted as much by a desire to shun pain as by a desire to obtain happiness, and the prospect of rising above all pain once for all is strong enough to impel a person convinced of the misery of empirical existence to do his utmost for reaching that end. But the aim of life should not only be desirable; it should also be possible of attainment and the doctrine holds, as we know, that evil though real can be avoided. For pain like pleasure is only an adventitious feature of the self and its removal means no loss to its intrinsic character. For instance in deep sleep, the self remains without either, which may be taken to indicate the possibility of moksa being a similar but permanent condition. It is not only pain and pleasure that are adventitious, but also knowledge, desire, volition, etc., so that the state of mokşa is one in which the self is able to cast off all its nine specific qualities. Accordingly, the self then not merely transcends empirical life, but also ceases to be the subject of experience in all its forms.
It is interesting to compare this ideal with that of Buddhism. Buddha taught that avoiding pleasure and pain or eliminating selfishness is not possible until we cease to believe in the self as a persisting entity. The NyāyaVaišeşika differs in admitting an enduring self; but it insists that the ideal of life is not reached until we feel convinced that the self in reality is beyond all experience. Thus the source of evil in this system lies not in our belief that there is a permanent self, but in the belief that it must needs have pain or pleasure while in its intrinsic nature it is devoid of both. Such a wrong view of the self gives rise to love and hate; and the rest of life's selfish activities follow from them. This theory which is implicit in the Vaiseşika analysis of the springs of action into desire for pleasure (rāga) and aversion from pain (dveşa), the Nyāya makes explicit by resolving them into something more ultimate, viz. * NS. I. i. 20-1; NM. P. 501.
* NS. IV. i. 63.
