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GEORGE BURCH
position in Vedanta philosophy which the theory of knowledge occupies in Western philosophy. To understand ignorance is to understand the world, not in order to accept it but in order to reject it.
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Ignorance has the twofold power of concealing truth and creating error. "The real nature of Brahman is concealed and the world is projected" (p. 84). The concealment of Brahman has no beginning and so has no cause, yet it has a "logical ground" in ignorance. An error, however, has a beginning and so must have a cause. The cause of the world is "Brahman associated with maya" (p. 136). How this is so, and how we can know it to beso, the book endeavors to show.
Dr. Chaudhuri's second book" discusses two concepts, the self and falsity, from the point of view of the sixteenth-century Vedanta classic Advaitasiddhi, and compares the orthodox Advaita doctrine concerning these concepts with various other views. The importance of revelation in Vedanta is clearly acknowledged.
Philosophy begins with experience or the 'common view of things. It proposes to solve the queries that naturally arise in the human mind. The questions that Philosophy sets to itself are generally suggested by the given facts. But the problems cannot all be satisfactorily solved by experience. . . . Doubt, thus, assails the mind and we cannot solve the problem of the self only from the given facts, because the notions derived from experience are not all free from logical inconsistency. . . . We should then resort to the scriptures for the final solution of the problem. Seers and sages are pure in mind and their intelligence is free from turbidity. The eternal verities appear before their settled. vision in unsullied form (pp. 40-41).
Normal experience, however, has indications which point to the same truths taught by scripture. A careful study of normal experience, in its three states of waking, dream, and dreamless sleep, will lead us to the scriptural truth that self is the only reality, "undifferenced consciousness and bliss." Falsity, which is both apprehended and negated, is distinguished from being, which is not negated, and non-being, which is not apprehended (pp. 118-119). The world-appearance is knowable, is non-intelligent, and is
11 Anil Kumar Ray Chaudhuri, Self and Falsity in Advaita Vedanta, with an Appendix on Theories of Reality in Indian Philosophy (Calcutta, 1955).
