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CRITICISM OF THE VEDANTA AVIDYA
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relation with consciousness. The Vedāntist believes that consciousness, absolute and undifferenced, is the only reality and is the very stuff and essence of all that exists and appears. The appearance of plurality according to the Vedāntist is erroneous, and as such must have a reason of its own. This reason is found in nescience. And so the nescience is not only subjective but also objective because it is co-pervasive with consciousness in its entire range.
Now the individual is not the seat of ignorance according to Sureśvara for twofold reason. In the first place the individual is nothing different from absolute consciousness in point of reality. And if the individual be regarded as ontologically different from the Absolute, which is not however the position of any section of the monistic school, then also the individual cannot be regarded as the locus of nescience. The individualization of the self is itself the result of nescience and as such cannot be the determinant of the incidence of nescience which is its very presupposition. Nescience must have a local habitation of its own as the possibility of nescience as a floating entity has been found to be absurd. It must then have pure consciousness as its locus and abode and from the evidence of our own experience we find that nescience is a felt fact. This shows that pure eternal consciousness cannot be opposed to nescience. On the contrary it constitutes the only evidence of its being. Opposition is both a priori and empirical. The opposition of being and non-being is felt a priori. But other types of opposition are empirical and as such can be known only from experience. We have found that there is no opposition between pure consciousness and nescience, Pure consciousness means consciousness which is not determined by any objective reference. It is bereft of subject-object polarization. Pure consciousness thus means unpolarized consciousness. It is not relevant to our purpose to prove that unpolarized consciousness is possible though it is stoutly opposed by Rāmānuja and also the realists of the Nyāya-Vaiseșika school. The Sankhya-Yoga school and also the Jainas admit the possibility of pure consciousness at least in the final state of emancipation.
Granted that there is no opposition between pure consciousness and nescience. But how to account for the opposition of nescience as error with knowledge? It is felt beyond the shadow of a doubt that our erroneous perception of shell as silver is cancelled and corrected by knowledge of the shell in its true character. Our knowledge of shell is attended with the negative judgment 'It is not silver'. This shows that there is opposition between knowledge and error which is nothing but a species of nescience. This has puzzled many a respectable philosopher and it has been seriously asserted that the Vedāntist is guilty of self-contradiction. But this is due to their failure to distinguish between knowledge and pure consciousness. Pure conscious
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