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Reals in the Jaina Metaphysics
substances, their subtle causes, the equilibrious state transcending them and the abstract pure being itself are but the aspects of the Brahma respectively as Virāt, Hiranyagarbha, Avyākta and Sanmātra. The individual soul in its corresponding psychical states of awakening, dreamful sleep, dreamless deep slumber and pure consciousness appears respectively as Viśva, Taijasa, Präjña and Çinmātra. The Sabdikas with whom word is the fundamental reality conceive of four similar aspects of it. The Vaikhari are the sensuous sounds i.e. the words uttered by us. The Madhyamă are the subtle sounds, not audible through the gross senses of our hearing, that are internal cognitive phenomena. The Paśyanti is the supersensuous sound transcending both the preceding while the Parā-Vāk is the ultimate self-luminous reality. The Sabdika thinkers maintain that as word is thus the essential basis of the objects of our experience as well as of the expressions signifying them a word is capable of signifying its object. The Sabdika's point out that unless we posit the real and eternal existence of sound as a substance, our every day expressions such as 'We read the Veda's three times', 'this is the same letter B’, become meaningless. These expressions prove that even after the first reading of the Vedas or the first utterance of the letter B is over and inaudible, the sounds continue to exist in a subtle and supersensuous state which makes their subsequent emergence possible.
BUDDHIST THEORY OF WORD
In our first discourse we saw how Dharmottara and other Buddhist philosophers criticised the Mimāṁsaka theory of the reality and substantiality of sound. They pointed out that if there were a real relationship between a word and its object, the two would have been found as actually associated together. In other words, as an examplewherever the word pitcher was uttered, we would have met with an actual pitcher there and wherever there was a pitcher we would have experienced the sound pitcher also there. The Buddhists contend that the nature of a word
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