World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

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changed Godmother-in-law that she has been amazingly graced with her long-wished magnificent vision-presentification, mahadarsan of none other than the great viyukta Lord himself descended from the Kailash parvat (an amsa-avatara as said of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa) in the dis-guise of a dishevelled sadhuman! Soha, soham. 'Siva is me, Siva is me' as she clutches her damp sari-fold and turns over (mafkijiye, me maili hoon, muckho bahar jani hein: excuse me I am moon-soiled, ought dutifully to go bathroom ). Jiteraho beti; narayana, narayana.. oops, hare hare Sankara-sambhooh.. Omnamah Sivaya, civayah namah-om.
The masala lover -- who incidentally had wheeled himself on chaarpaiya 4.D phat-phat-zatpat Maurutivan only from across the polluted Yamuna, Delhi's Mrs Sippeoy-bugbear-to-Maneka Gandhi -- equally overcome, gasping his second breath understands that the most important moment of his ministerial mission has been climaxed: that a sublime com-union (sam-yogibhaj) of two souls via the requisite propertied universals felicitous towards the exchange and mutual elevation of perceptions, from the veritable mundane to the sacredly erotic has been achieved; as though from the dirt of Brooklyn to the sky-kissing windy levitation of the erotic chicaloquent linga-yoni simulation, sufficient to send a hostage of unsuspecting, innocuous countrified damsels as indeed our heroine here into rapturous illogical or non-rational flirtatious, thought-surpassing, ecstatic extra-textual raptures. 'You really think Indian culture is about logicH not tantra or alchemy?' Here is a match-maker of lost souls and mad-donor ghee of immaculate conceptions and inducer of ruptures too. This sadhu of sadhus, fishy rishi 4D yogi, or philosopher-priest and -priestess united in one is none other than the 8th century Naiyayika Jayanta Bhatta, himself bored witless in his prison incarceration, and reincarnated as Stephen Phillips now in Austinapura, the arch-defender in our times of Nyaya's 'mystic empiricism' (yogipratyaksa) modality arguably given short shrift in the analytic obsessive-compulsive logicism of Bimalda Matilal. But before I turn to the classical texts let me
summarize the key narrative gestures here and lay the narrator, Rushdie's * Dimpleton Billimoria, to a well-deserved vishraam, siesta.
I want to underscore this mystic moment which is at once empirical as it is transcendental: the first moment conforms to the standard empirical analysis - which is also roughly the Nyaya theory of perception -- of the process of coming to have a perception in the form of noetic presentation evoked by sensation (in nirvikalpa state) maturing into an object-linguo-cognition (savikalpajnana) when the senses come in contact with a propertied substance out there. The erstwhile debate among British empiricists of whether the medium is that of sense-data or some light-fusion radiation, phenomenalism's abhida gatherings, or as in the astika-Indian context, whether the sense-organ of the mind or some subtle vibratory consciousness loops across to the table - and even to the non-existent stars in our heaven
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