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Means of Valid Cognition Other Than Verbal Testimony
is necessarily sense-perception and as such perception of a present object. Hence his submission that the aphorist was not interested in offering a definition of perception but only in insisting that perception does not yield information about religious matters because its object is necessarily a present thing and that in turn because it is born of sense-object contact (vv. 17-18). It is by way of elucidating this submission that repeated mention is made of the alleged yogic perception-- the purpose being to deny the possibility of such a perception (v. 21, v. 26–32, v. 35–36).
Then the question about the aphorist intending or not intending to offer a defininition of perception. It was felt that what the aphorist has said about perceptual cognition is doubtless true of all valid perceptual cognition but that it is equally true of certain cases of invalid perceptual cognition. To be explicit, the aphorist says that perceptual cognition arises in the wake of sense-object contact and this description is of course not true of an invalid perceptual cognition like dreaming which takes place without there being any sort of sense-object contact but it is true of an invalid perceptnal cognition like misperceiving nacre for silver which certainly takes place as a result of some sort of sense-object contact (vv. 10-11).
An old commentator--the reputed Vịttikära— had sought to obviate the difficulty by proposing a variant reading (it cosisted in reading tat for sat and vice versa) which should make the aphorism mean "valid perceptual cognition of an object is that cognition which arises in the wake of a sense--organ coming in contact with this object' (vv. 13-14). Kumārila reports all this but in the end opines that even as it stands the aphorist's wording can be made to yield a good definition of perception; for the aphorist's word for contact is sampra yoga and this, on account of the prefix sam, can be made to mean not any sort of contact but just the proper sort of it--that is, contact with just that object which happens to be the object of perceptual cognition (vv. 38-39). In this connection Kumārila even suggests that the word prayoga might be made to mean not contact but operation, and in that case the proposed definition should be acceptable even to the Buddhists according to whom the visual and auditory sense-organs perceive their respesctive objects not through coming in contact with them but merely through operating from a distance (vv. 40-43). Lastly, the question about the aphorist's silence about the remaining means of valid cognition other than verbal testimony, Kumārila begins by quoting an opponent who in essence avers that this silence could be understandable in case a definition of perception implied a definition of those remaining means inference etc. or in case these inference etc. necessarily presupposed perception (vv. 2-8). That a definition of perception does not imply a definition of inference etc. is obvious and Kumārila does not consider the point. But in the end he does consider the view of an opponent who seeks to show that inference etc. do not presuppose perception and that in some sense even Vedic testimony presupposes perception (vv. 87-94). E. g., on the showing of this opponent inference does not presuppose
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