Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 92

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SAMAYASARA
repudiates the doctrine of Buddhism that the external world is purely psychical and as such has no substantiality of its own. What is the significance of this paradoxical attitude? According to the Sankhyan doctrine as to the origin and nature of the world the External world is evolved out of Prakrti which being opposed to Purusa is Acetana. It is more or less similar to the modern scientific “Matter" Besides this Praksti Sankhya postulates the existence of the Puruşas. Now for the Vedantin everything existing is the manifestation of Brahma, The Brahma being Cetana entity it is not difficult to derive individual souls therefrom. But the Vadantin derives the external world also from the same. But the external world is acetana entity and is therefore opposed to thought. Hence it cannot be easily derived from Brahma. Sankara certainly has recognised the fundamental difference between the two Cetana and Acetana and warns the reader against confusion. Yet he wants to logically maintain that every thing living and non-living is derived from the same Brahma. He tries to reconcile the two irreconcilable doctrines. First he maintains that the subject is quite independent of the object and the two have nothing in common and that all ills of life are due to confusion between the two. Secondly he wants to show that there is only one existence ultimate and real and that all else is purely derivative. If he is successful in establishing the former doctrine (the distinction between the subject and object) he cannot at the same time maintain the latter. The actual result is he introduces a sort of make-believe reconciliation. The objective world is something derived from maya. Maya is the substantial and constitutive of the external world. The stuff of which objective world is made is variously described as Maya Praksti and Pradhana. He thus introduces Sankhyan terminology in order to emphasise its distinction from Puruşa. Pursuing this line of thought he ought to have got the conclusion that the external world is constituted by a substance fundamentally distinct from and incompatible with Self or Brahma. This would have landed him in a dualism which he streneously tries to avoid. Thus the problem with him was to retain the Sankhyan dualism just to emphasise the distinction between the subject and object and at the same time to maintain Vedantic monisin. In this attempt at a compromise his language becomes ambiguous and his own attitude wavers between Dualism and Monism. He satisfied himself by introducing two kinds of existence or Sat corresponding to Purusa and Praksti and yet these two kinds of Sat he wants to derive from the Cetana Brahma. Beyond the Brahma there could be no existence, he being the only Sat as well as the only Cit. Hence the Prakşti which Sankara requisition to explain the external world is not only acit, non-thought, but also asat--non-real. Being asat inasmuch as it is distinct from Brahma, it must be identical with mere nothing and yet it must be substantial enough to be the basis of objective world. It is such an impossible function assigned to Maya by Sankara. He cannot condemn it altogether to be nothing for he expects real work out of it and so far it must have some causal potency.