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....The greater part of what Shankara has to say against the Buddhists, however, is said in criticism of the Vijñana Vada in the form in which that doctrine was propagated by Dharmakirti, and this is the only form of the Buddhist doctrine with which we can be certain that he had some measure of direct acquaintance. The Yogacara or Vijñana Vada tradition, as maintained by Dharmakirti, derived, through Dinnaga, partly from Vasubandhu the Later, and was influenced by Sautrantika teaching. If the Sankhyas saw all change as occurring within one identical substance, and if the Vaisheikas saw change as the coming together and parting of eternal changeless atoms, the Sautrantikas, for their part, took the fact of change very seriously, and, as a result, denied that anything had any duration or substantiality anywhere. They were left with a staccato series of momentary ‘factors of existence’ (dharma), each distinct from its successor in the chain, but succeeding one another so fast as to set up the appearance of a permanent observer (soul) inhabiting a world of solid, enduring objects. There being no material causality, all causality was held to be efficient causality, and all ‘factors of existence’, including cognitions, were conditioned to come into momentary existence by other momentary ‘factors of existence’ that had gone before. The external (non-mental) factors had their direct (hetu-pratyaya) and indirect (adhipati-pratyaya) causes. Mental factors (viz. ‘ideas’ in the Lockean sense) were conditioned partly by the immediately preceding mental factor in the series (sam-anantara-pratyaya) and partly by external factors as objects (lambana-pratyaya). The object is in one sense given in perception, since it conditions the idea. Yet it is (paradoxically) not perceived, as, being momentary, it has already gone out of existence before perception can take place, like a distant star that may continue to be ‘perceived’ in the world long after it is actually extinct. Perception is in fact pervaded through and through by imaginative construction (vikalpa).
The Sautrantika doctrine, however, underwent an idealistic transmutation at the hands of Dinnaga and the logicians of his school. To begin with, extension as well as duration was shorn away from the objective reals, which were now reduced to unique point-instants. It was still maintained that they were in some sense ‘given’ in perception, but all representation was now said to proceed through universal ideas, which were taken to be mere imaginative constructs. Only the unique point-instants are real, and all universals are fictions; but the latter are nevertheless the only basis of practical experience and activity in ordinary life. Each real point-instant being unique, individuals can only be grouped into classes on the basis of exclusion (apoha) of anything else. The individuals forming a class are alike only in being distinct from all other reals outside the class, and all representation of their behaviour depends on universal ideas proceeding from imaginative construction. Dharmakirti raised the question of how, if the reals are unique point-instants, universal ideas can come to be applied to them at all. As so often in considering the teachings of this school, one is reminded here also of Kant, who included in the most difficult section of the Critique of Pure Reason an effort to explain how the universal and necessary a priori concepts of the understanding could be applied to the raw data of sense, which were totally disparate from them in kind. Dharmakirti, however, merely says that this is a problem that is only raised in theory, never in practice. Things which, because they produce a given effect in practice, can be distinguished from what does not produce it, are given a common name for purposes of communication.
But the object was not only reduced to a unique point-instant. It was also declared non-different from the cognition whereby it was perceived. As the object is never perceived without the cognition, it cannot be proved to be anything different from the cognition. You cannot argue that, because when a healthy eye and light are present we sometimes see a pillar and sometimes do not, it follows that cognitions must be determined by an object that is external to consciousness (i.e. the presence of the objective pillar), for cognitions can very well (on the Sautrantika theory) be determined by the immediately preceding cognition. Knowledge is self-luminous. It is illogical to suppose that it could illumine a non-luminous object. It is the momentary cognition itself which assumes the form of an objective characteristic, say blue, under the impulse of the impregnations of previous experience. A cognition cannot be experienced by anything else beyond itself (say an eternal Witness), as the same objection would arise, namely that one thing cannot be aware of another that is different in kind. The fact of hallucinations shows that there can very well be the erroneous notion that an external object is present when only a cognition that has assumed the form of an external object is present. Though consciousness is in truth without parts, it is taken by deluded people to be divided into three as object, idea and act of self-illumination.
Shankara was committed by the text of the Brahma Sutras to state and attack the doctrine of the Sarvastivadin ‘realists’, the Vijñana Vadin ‘idealists’ and the Madhyamika ‘nihilists’ in that order...
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