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PROBLEM OF AVIDYA
[CH.
position. The greatest protagonist of negativism as a philosophical doctrine is Nāgārjuna. He has subjected to critical examination all the prevailing concepts and theories and has found particular delight in
posing their self-contradictory nature. Nāgārjuna adopts the attitude of a critic who avows that he has no positive doctrine of his own. The position will be made clear from our study of some concrete problems as dissected by Nāgārjuna.
Let us take up causality. Nāgārjuna asserts that causality is logically indeterminable, yet the constitution of our intellect is such that we cannot jettison it if we are to understand the world order. He asserts that the effect is not produced by itself, that is to say, the effect cannot be its own cause. In other words, the cause and the effect cannot be identical. The cause is the immediate antecedent event. If the effect were self-caused, it would be antecedent to itself. And this means that the effect was existent before. What is then the use of the causal operation which aims at bringing into existence what was not in existence before. It is nonsense to suppose that an existent can be made existent which the advocate of the identity of cause and effect is made to confess on cross-examination. The Sänkhya philosopher seeks to explain the causal relation by supposing that the effect is pre-existent in the cause. It is because of pre-existence that causality becomes a relation between two determinates. To the question 'Why should oil be produced from sesamum and not from sand?' the Sānkhya answer is 'Because oil is existent in the sesamum and not in the sand'. Nāgārjuna observes that the position is untenable because if oil be already existent, what is the necessity of grinding the sesamum seeds in an oil-press. The Sānkhya answers that oil is existent only in a latent form and causal operation is necessary to make it patent. But is not patency a novel phenomenon? If it were also existent there is no point in trying to make it patent because this means that the already existing patency is made patent. Is this not a superfluity? To this question the Sankhya seems to turn a deaf ear. The Sāńkhya has been constrained to say that the effect was existent not in the form which it assumes after the causal operation. But this means that the effect was existent somehow. To be precise, the effect was existent as cause, and the relation of cause and effect is not one of absolute identity but identity-cum-difference. This is the Jaina position. But the Sankhya has not the courage to assert that this is so. Nāgārjuna's criticism of the Sankhya theory of causation is unassailable if by identity of the cause and the effect the Sankhya is understood to mean absolute and exclusive identity which is contradictorily opposed to difference.
Let us now examine Nāgārjuna's criticism of the Nyāya theory of causation. The cause and effect are absolutely different. But
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