Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 82

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SAMAYASARA
responsible for this. Similarly the relation between Prakti and Purusa is a case of purposive adaptation without the necessity of an intelligent adjuster. Praksti unconciously itself operates for the benefit of Puruşa and is a case of unconscious inner necessity to serve the purpose of the soul. The adaptation between the two is absolutaly unconscious thougt suggestive of an intelligent designer. Again through the help of Prakṣti Puruşa is able to obtain discriminative knowledge about his true nature. The Purusa is able to realise himself to be absolutely independent of and uninfluenced by the Praksti activities. He knows he is different from the senses, Buddhi and ahamkára. This realisation of independence from the environment including his own psychophysical mechanism leads to perfect knowledge. Then the puruşa is able to perceive that the activities are all due to Praksti while he himself remains in unruffled peace. Praksti ceases to affect him. Praksti retires from the stage saying "I have been seen. I can no more please the Puruşa" and then the Puruşa remains calm and peaceful saying "I have seen her; no more can she please me." This discriminative knowledge and the consequent retirement of the Puruşa from the cosmic stage is an interesting philosophical metaphor. Praksti or nature continues to spin round on account of its own original impulse even after Puruşa's liberation. But this activity can no more influence the liberated Puruşa because through knowledge he obtained freedom or Mokşa.
The main objection is that Kapila starts his system as a panacea for the evils in this world. He thereby recognises at least to some extent the importance of ethical value. But the system as finally wrought out by him is incapable of accommodating any such moral value. Human volition and consequent human conduct as such are said to be the effects of acetana Praksti virtue and vice are alien to the Purusa. They are associated with the nonspiritual Praksti and hence they do not affect the soul and yet with a strange inconsistency it is the fate of Puruşa so enjoy the fruits pleasurable and painful of the karmas directly and immediately due to the activity of Praksti. Why it is the fate of Puruşa that he should vicariously suffer the consequences of an alien being is life entirely unexplained. To be consistent with his own presuppositions he ought to have made Puruşa indifferent to the consequential pleasure or pains of conduct. But that would have made the Puruşa an altogether unintelligible shadow of reality. It is this inherent paralysis of his system that strikes us as an important defect. In spite of the various defects we have to pay our homage to the great ancient thinker for the courageous application of the rational method for the problem of life and reality. In a remote age of Indian thought when customary dogmas played the dominant part in the explanation of philosophical problems it is really a mattar for admiration to see such a rigorous and rational thinker as Kapila. In philosophical study the method is more important than the resultsThe results may be modified but the method leaves a permanent