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CX
SAMAYASARA
pound the doctrine of the unreality of the objective world. What is the justification for such a conclusion. There is no doubt he is supported by certain Upanishadic passages as well as by some of his predecessors like Gaudapada But we have to remember that many Upanishadic passages that declare the external world as unreal do so only metaphorically and comparatively The Upanishadic doctrine compaies with the Cartesian doctrine of gradation. The ultimate substance has the maximum of reality whereas man has less of that But with Sankara it is otherwise. For him a thing must be Sat or an Asat To be real, a thing must be Chit and what is not Chit must necessarily be Asat Thus after establishing the reality of atman and the illusoriness of the rest Sankara is confronted with an extraordinary difficulty to reconcile his philosophy with the common sense view on the one hand and the traditional Vedic religion on the other. He manages this by his distinction between Vyavaharıka and Paramarthika points of view. Foi all practical purposes and for the ordinary affairs of religion the world may be taken as real though philosophically it is no more than the phantom of a deluded personality. Many Vedantins bring in the parallel of Kant who also has a duality. The world is empirically real but transcendentally ideal. But we should protest against such a comparison. For Kant recognises 'the so called thing-in-itself which is the ultimate source. The phenomenal world is the resultant of the interaction between thing-in-itself and Ego in itself the one supplies the stuff and the other the form. That is one of the reasons why Kant protests against Berkley and wanted to keep his philosophy entirely different from that. Sankara's advaitism is fundamentally different from Kant's phenomanilism. He is more akin to Fichte's. Even this resemblance is superficial for the monistic idealism of Fichte is only a metaphisical explanation of moral value. According to Fichte the world of objective reality is a stage or an arena created by the Ego for its own moral exercise. Moral value is the pivot on which Fichte's monism revolves. But for Sankara all these values have reference to human life and human personality and therefore must be relegated to the realm of illusions from the higher point of View.
