World of Philosophy

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

Page 113

ward wonderment, or the absent partner in the dreadful darkness -- need not concern us for the moment. There is one-to-one immediate expropriation of the thing out there - reality - by the mind sense, which informs (outforms rather) the understanding in the locus of the cognitive event itself (that is to say, the perception episodically occurs out there in the thing by virtue of the vibhu-expansion of the mind through the mediation of the senses). Let us call this nana 'direct naïve darshan'. In the second moment, in certain non-constraining epistemic environments, a parallel but deeper phenomenological process takes place, wherein an unusual and unique sameness of the thing to an elusive general class is apprehended; the theory is that there is also a conjunct of the mind sense (the sixth sense in Nyaya) with the imperceptible universal alongside the universal given in normal perception (this is the samanya as distinct from the jati or universal or akrti of Mimamsa that particularizes a thing as possessing such and such property). The samanya here as a second-order modal perception discloses the class to which even the jati-qualified object belongs (in all possible worlds), e.g. cownesstva of cowness; hindutva of Hindu-ness (?!).
There may even be a separate third-order perception that has a distinct knowledge of the categories of such samenesses or modal universals (dravya substantives, propertied subsistences, and timeless events), unattached to any particulars or even classes. The knowledge of the infiniteexpanding expanding self, omniscience, liberation (moksa), summum bonum of nihsreya, would be four instances of this extraordinary subpramana ignored by one of the greatest Nyaya philosopher-expositors of our times, Bimal Krishna Matilal.
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