Sambodhi 1984 Vol 13 and 14

Author(s): Dalsukh Malvania, Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 84

AVIDYA - ITS ĀŠKAYA AND VISAYA
E. A. Solomon
Sankarācārya's main thesis was that Brahman alone is the Ultimate Reality, everything else being unreal. But how did the world-appearance become manifest and out of what ? Sankara does not seem to have thought it worthwhile to answer such questions at length. For him Avidya is a good postulate which ansvers all such questions satisfactorily. He did not deal explicitly with such problems as the relation of Avidya with Maya or with Brahman or with Jiva or with the phenoinenal world aud lie did not diseluss very clearly whether Avidyā is the material cause (upādāna karana) or an auxiliary cause (salikari-karapa) of the world. In fact, he would plainly tell us that the world was never created, so one should not bother oneself with questions pertaining to causality and the like. To discuss these problems would be equivalent to regarding Avidya as a real principle, whereas it is tuccha or an absolutely nonexisting thing from the highest point of view. Avidya expresses in a nut-shell the difficulty we experience in recognising that what we experience in the mundane world is not in reality there. Sankara aware of the limitations of reason left such problems to intuitive experience culminating in truth-realisation which is indispensable for the attainment of emancipation when such problems do not trouble the person at all as Pure Consciousness alone persists without the differentiation of the subject and the object.
The words of Sankara could be interpreted in diverse ways though the general scheme was sufficiently well-defined. Appayya Dikşita notes in the beginning of his "Siddhantaleśasangraha, that the ancients were more concerned with proving the oneness of all phenomenal objects with the Self and so on account of thicir indifference to other matters they led the way to divergent views or currents of thought. These divergent views are but different ways of explaining cogently the central thesis that Bralunan is the Absolute Reality and everything else is an unreal appearance from the absolute point of view.2
We may first take up the concept of Avidya as found in Mandana Misra who is regarded as a contemporary of Sankara and whose views are quite independent and present a distinct trend of Vedantic interpretation. Mandana sa s that Avidya is called māyā or false appearance