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Studies in Indian Philosophy
these two extremes. People use sentence such as (9c ), under stood to mean that this body is the self, but they also say (11)
' This is my body'. from which one understands ones body and oneself to be distinct related things. 12
In everyday life, the body and the self are not discriminated. No one grasps them as totally distinct objects. No one says, “This is the body, this is the self,' as though he had grasped the two as objects of fully discriminated cognitions. Thus, people are indeed confused concerniüg just what sort of thing this self is, 13 From examples such as (9), one can see that linguistic usage contributes to this confusion. Such sentences are acceptable. People see nothing strange in talking of themselves as physical beings with properties like colors. 14
Reasoning with anvaya and vyatireka in connection with the self serves in the first instance to show that certain things are not properly the self. As shown earlier, Śarkara refutes an argument of materialists by showing that (5a, b) do not hold in all instances. Sureśvara uses similar reasoning to demonstrate that certain entities should not be treated as being the self (anātman 'other than the self '). Consider two reasons he gives for concluding that the physical body is not the self.15 The first has to do with properties. It is taken for granted that people have no doubts concerning two extremes : Things like water pots are not the self, and whatever else the self may be, it is a perceiving entity.16 Now a pot has the property of being to be seen, of being an object of perception, but it is never an agent of perceiving. I addition, it must be granted that the physical body is no less susceptible of being seen than a pot, and by the same means. Suppose, then, one claimed the physical body to be the self. For this to be acceptable, it would have to be demonstrated that the body too has tbe property of being a perceiving agent. But of course it does not. In other words, (la, b) do not hold if the values of X and Y, respectively, are the physical
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