Vaishali Institute Research Bulletin 1

Author(s): Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Research Institute of Prakrit Jainology & Ahimsa Mujjaffarpur

Page 29

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VAISHALI INSTITUTE RESEARCH BULLETIN NO. I
the heels of another. It is based on the assumption that one consciousness as cause will produce another consciousness as effect without break and as a matter of inevitable necessity. But causal continua, when frustrated by obstructive agents, are found to cease. For instance, darkness which is a positive entity according to the Buddhist ceases to exist and vanishes into nothingness when confronted with light. Darkness has been regarded as negation of light by the Nyāya-Vaiseșika school; but with due deference to these theories we may substitute light for darkness. Furthermore a jar is destroyed when it is crushed with a cudgel. There is no logical or ontological necessity that the series of cause and effect will continue without break. And this has been shown by the exarnpies cited by us. The Buddhist Fluxist (Kșanikavādin) and the Idealist (Vijñanavadin) cannot prove that consciousness-series, which functions as the knowing subject, will continue as a matter of universal necessity. The possibility of its meeting with extinction inakes havoc of the intellectual, inoral and religious discipline. The subject will be debarred by powerful disincentives from the pursuit of intellectual, moral and religious activities. So this theory of the Vijñānavadin cannot be acceptable as true estimate of subjective consciousness.
The third proposition postulates the existence of other subjects. But we have already shown that it is based on uncritical faith, and solipsism is the logical consequence. The experience of objective facts is not liable to be dismissed in a cavalier fashion. If experience of the object is denied its validity, self-experience of the conscious subject will also be liable to be demolished like the experience of object having nothing to secure its survival. In fact the Sunyavādin has dismissed both consciousness and content as unrelieved appearence. The positive assertion of Siddhasena Divākara that consciousness necessarily illumines an object cannot therfore be challenged on pain of absurd consequences.
Dharmakīrti has produced a novel argument to prove the identity of cognition and the object. The object that is supposed to be standing independent of the subject cannot be apprehended by a cognition for want of a necessary nexus. The Sautrāntikas suppose that the object imprints its image on the cognition and the object is inferred to be the original of it just as a person infers the existence of his face from the reflection in the mirror. But this analogy cannot stand scrutiny. A man sees the reflection of another man's image in the original and its reflection and their comparison enables a man to infer the likeness of his face to the image in the mirror. But there is no such comparison