Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 85

İNTRODUCTION
Responsibility of the Creator-Samkhya emphasises the fact that an Iśvara being an intelligent cause of the universe must be responsible for the whole of the cosmos including the faults thereof. The defence put in the Brahma-sútras is something obscure. Here the author takes his stand on the separateness of Brahman from Jivātmā. According to the Samkhya view activity implies desire and motive. Creation as an act must therefore imply a desire and motive in the agent. The desire of Brahma to bring about the world, cannot be a desire to help various beings, for they are still uncreated and non-existent. If there is a motive for the activity the motive must imply some sort of want in the creator. The answer is that there is no genuipe motive for the creator. According to the Vedāntic defence Brahma creates the universe merely out of sport or Lila. But the next is the more important objection. It relates to the responsibility of the creator for uneven distribution of pleasure and pains. The answer offered by Vedanta is a bit strange. The act of creation is not said to be quite arbitrary but takes into consideration the merit and the demerit of the individual soul. This defence naturally implies that the individual souls should have their separate and independent existence and that they are not really created though they are destined to undergo a periodic cosmic slumber from which they get awakened at the beginning of creation. How such a doctrine of individual selves could be reconciled to Vedāntic monism is not clarly shown. Neither the sætras nor the great commentary of Samkara is helpful. The latter part of the second book is devoted to the refutation of the other theories such as Vaiśeşika, Bauddha, and Jaina. The author again and again returns to the criticism of Samkhya. There is an inte. resting point to be noticed before we take leave of this. Buddhism is condemned to be unreal. We shall be surprised to see both the Sūtrakāra and the commentator Šamkara reject the Bauddha conception for this reason that according to Buddhistic view the world of external reality is purely mental and unreal. This reason offered for rejecting the Buddhistic view is certainly perplexing. The Bauddhas are found fault with because they annihilate the fundamental distinction between the concrete world of reality and the dream world of unreality and they believe that the world is made of such stuff as dreams are made of. And yet this is the very conclusion to which Vedanta is striving. This surprising philosophical attitude has a parallel in western thought. Kant establishing the phenomenality of the external world to his satisfaction gives vent to righteous indignation at Berkleyan idealism to refute which he devotes one full chapter. Berkley would be much more akin to the ordinary view and yet Kant in the west and Samkara-in the East claim the privilege of protesting against their own conclusions, when they are heard from alien quarters. To us it is interesting in this way. Idealism which is considered to be the claim of philosophic thought even in its