long in this stage the old potencies (samskāras) or impressions due to the continued experience of worldly events tending towards the objective world or towards any process of experiencing inner thinking are destroyed by the production of a strong habit of the nirodha state. At this stage dawns the true knowledge, when the buddhi becomes as pure as the purușa, and after that the citta not being able to bind the purușa any longer returns back to prakṛti. In order to practise this concentration one has to see that there may be no disturbance, and the yogin should select a quiet place on a hill or in a forest. One of the main obstacles is, however, to be found in our constant respiratory action. This has to be stopped by the practice of prānāyāma. Prāṇāyāma consists in taking in breath, keeping it for a while and then giving it up. With practice one may retain breath steadily for hours, days, months and even years. When there is no need of taking in breath or giving it out, and it can be retained steady for a long time, one of the main obstacles is removed. The process of practising concentration is begun by sitting in a steady posture, holding the breath by prāṇāyāma, excluding all other thoughts, and fixing the mind on any object (dhāraṇā). At first it is difficult to fix steadily on any object, and the same thought has to be repeated constantly in the mind, this is called dhyana. After sufficient practice in dhyāna the mind attains the power of making itself steady; at this stage it becomes one with its object and there is no change or repetition. There is no consciousness of subject, object or thinking, but the mind becomes steady and one with the object of thought. This is called samādhi1. We have already described the six stages of samādhi. As the yogin acquires strength in one stage of samādhi, he passes on to a still higher stage and so on. As he progresses onwards he attains miraculous powers (vibhūti) and his faith and hope in the practice increase. Miraculous powers bring with them many temptations, but the yogin is firm of purpose and even though the position of Indra is offered to him he does not relax. His wisdom (prajñā) also increases at each step. Prajñā knowledge is as clear as perception, but while perception is limited to 1 It should be noted that the word samadhi cannot properly be translated either by "concentration" or by "meditation." It means that peculiar kind of concentration in the Yoga sense by which the mind becomes one with its object and there is no movement of the mind into its passing states. certain gross things and certain gross qualities1 prajñā has no such limitations, penetrating into the subtlest things, the tanmātras, the guņas, and perceiving clearly and vividly all their subtle conditions and qualities. As the potencies (samskāra) of the prajñā wisdom grow in strength the potencies of ordinary knowledge are rooted out, and the yogin continues to remain always in his prajñā wisdom. It is a peculiarity of this prajñā that it leads a man towards liberation and cannot bind him to samsāra. The final prajñās which lead to liberation are of seven kinds, namely, (1) I have known the world, the object of suffering and misery, I have nothing more to know of it. (2) The grounds and roots of samsara have been thoroughly uprooted, nothing more of it remains to be uprooted. (3) Removal has become a fact of direct cognition by inhibitive trance. (4) The means of knowledge in the shape of a discrimination of purușa from prakṛti has been understood. The other three are not psychological but are rather metaphysical processes associated with the situation. They are as follows: (5) The double purpose of buddhi experience and emancipation (bhoga and apavarga) has been realized. (6) The strong gravitating tendency of the disintegrated guņas drives them into prakṛti like heavy stones dropped from high hill tops. (7) The buddhi disintegrated into its constituents the gunas become merged in the prakṛti and remain there for ever. The puruşa having passed beyond the bondage of the gunas shines forth in its pure intelligence. There is no bliss or happiness in this Samkhya-Yoga mukti, for all feeling belongs to prakṛti. It is thus a state of pure intelligence. What the Samkhya tries to achieve through knowledge, Yoga achieves through the perfected discipline of the will and psychological control of the mental states. 1 The limitations which baffle perception are counted in the Kārikā as follows: Extreme remoteness (e.g. a lark high up in the sky), extreme proximity (e.g. collyrium inside the eye), loss of sense-organ (e.g. a blind man), want of attention, extreme smallness of the object (e.g. atoms), obstruction by other intervening objects (e.g. by walls), presence of superior lights (the star cannot be seen in daylight), being mixed up with other things of its own kind (e.g. water thrown into a lake). 2 Though all things are but the modifications of guņas yet the real nature of the guņas is never revealed by the sense-knowledge. What appears to the senses are but illusory characteristics like those of magic (māyā): “Guṇānām paramam rūpam na dṛṣṭipathamṛechati The real nature of the guņas is thus revealed only by prajñā. CHAPTER VIII THE NYAYA-VAIŠEṢIKA PHILOSOPHY Criticism of Buddhism and Samkhya from the THE Buddhists had upset all common sense convictions of substance and attribute, cause and effect, and permanence of things, on the ground that all collocations are momentary; each group of collocations exhausts itself in giving rise to another group and that to another and so on. But if a collocation representing milk generates the collocation of curd it is said to be due to a joint action of the elements forming the cause-collocation and the modus operandi is unintelligible; the elements composing the cause-collocation cannot separately generate the elements composing the effect-collocation, for on such a supposition it becomes hard to maintain the doctrine of momentariness as the individual and separate exercise of influence on the part of the cause-elements and their coordination and manifestation as effect cannot but take more than one moment. The supposition that the whole of the effect-collocation is the result of the joint action of the elements of cause-collocation is against our universal uncontradicted experience that specific elements constituting the cause (e.g. the whiteness of milk) are the cause of other corresponding elements of the effect (e.g. the whiteness of the curd); and we could not say that the hardness, blackness, and other properties of the atoms of iron in a lump state should not be regarded as the cause of similar qualities in the iron ball, for this is against the testimony of experience. Moreover there would be no difference between material (upādāna, e.g. clay of the jug), instrumental and concomitant causes (nimitta and sahakāri, such as the potter, and the wheel, the stick etc. in forming the jug), for the causes jointly produce the effect, and there was no room for distinguishing the material and the instrumental causes, as such. Again at the very moment in which a cause-collocation is brought into being, it cannot exert its influence to produce its effect-collocation. Thus after coming into being it would take the cause-collocation at least another moment to exercise its influence to produce the effect. How can the thing which is destroyed the moment after it is born produce any effect? The truth is that causal elements remain and when they are properly collocated the effect is produced. Ordinary experience also shows that we perceive things as existing from a past time. The past time is perceived by us as past, the present as present and the future as future and things are perceived as existing from a past time onwards. The Samkhya assumption that effects are but the actualized states of the potential cause, and that the causal entity holds within it all the future series of effects, and that thus the effect is already existent even before the causal movement for the production of the effect, is also baseless. Samkhya says that the oil was already existent in the sesamum and not in the stone, and that it is thus that oil can be got from sesamum and not from the stone. The action of the instrumental cause with them consists only in actualizing or manifesting what was already existent in a potential form in the cause. This is all nonsense. A lump of clay is called the cause and the jug the effect; of what good is it to say that the jug exists in the clay since with clay we can never carry water? A jug is made out of clay, but clay is not a jug. What is meant by saying that the jug was unmanifested or was in a potential state before, and that it has now become manifest or actual? What does potential state mean? The potential state of the jug is not the same as its actual state; thus the actual state of the jug must be admitted as non-existent before. If it is meant that the jug is made up of the same parts (the atoms) of which the clay is made up, of course we admit it, but this does not mean that the jug was existent in the atoms of the lump of clay. The potency inherent in the clay by virtue of which it can expose itself to the influence of other agents, such as the potter, for being transformed into a jug is not the same as the effect, the jug. Had it been so, then we should rather have said that the jug came out of the jug. The assumption of Sāmkhya that the substance and attribute have the same reality is also against all experience, for we all perceive that movement and attribute belong to substance and not to attribute. Again Samkhya holds a preposterous doctrine that buddhi is different from intelligence. It is absolutely unmeaning to call buddhi nonintelligent. Again what is the good of all this fictitious fuss that the qualities of buddhi are reflected on purușa and then again on buddhi. Evidently in all our experience we find that the soul (atman) knows, feels and wills, and it is difficult to understand why Sāmkhya does not accept this patent fact and declare that knowledge, feeling, and willing, all belonged to buddhi. Then again in order to explain experience it brought forth a theory of double reflection. Again Samkhya prakṛti is non-intelligent, and where is the guarantee that she (prakṛti) will not bind the wise again and will emancipate him once for all? Why did the purusa become bound down? Prakṛti is being utilized for enjoyment by the infinite number of purușas, and she is no delicate girl (as Samkhya supposes) who will leave the presence of the puruṣa ashamed as soon as her real nature is discovered. Again pleasure (sukha), sorrow (duḥkha) and a blinding feeling through ignorance (moha) are but the feeling-experiences of the soul, and with what impudence could Samkhya think of these as material substances? Again their cosmology of a mahat, ahaṁkāra, the tanmātras, is all a series of assumptions never testified by experience nor by reason. They are all a series of hopeless and foolish blunders. The phenomena of experience thus call for a new careful reconstruction in the light of reason and experience such as cannot be found in other systems. (See Nyayamañjarī, pp. 452-466 and 490-496.) Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika sūtras. It is very probable that the earliest beginnings of Nyāya are to be found in the disputations and debates amongst scholars trying to find out the right meanings of the Vedic texts for use in sacrifices and also in those disputations which took place between the adherents of different schools of thought trying to defeat one another. I suppose that such disputations occurred in the days of the Upaniṣads, and the art of disputation was regarded even then as a subject of study, and it probably passed then by the name of vakovākya. Mr Bodas has pointed out that Āpastamba who according to Bühler lived before the third century B.C.ue the word Nyaya in the sense of Mimāmsā'. The word Nyāyaṛ il 1 Ãpastamba, trans. by Bühler, Introduction, p. XXVII., and Bodas's arti' Historical Survey of Indian Logic in the Bombay Branch of J.R.A.S., vol. |