PHL 348

Spring 2003

Notes on some of Sankara’s arguments against opponents’ views and in defense of his own Advaita positions.

Brahmasutra 2.2.10.

Against Samkhya.

Opponent: How can suffering be an attribute of Brahman? (How can Brahman suffer?)

Answer. Brahman is non-dual, not the bearer of properties. Suffering exists only from the perspective of spiritual ignorance (a-vidya).

Furthermore, on the Samkhya dualistic metaphysics of conscious beings (purusa) and nature (prakrti), nature has to be the sufferer, not the conscious being (who is transcendent, etc.). Therefore, suffering is unintelligible on the Samkhya view.

If suffering is not an illusion, it belongs to nature. If it belongs to the conscious being, liberation (enlightenment, the goal Samkhya proclaims) would be impossible.

° ° °

2.2.11-12.

Vaisesika atomist (whom we shall take as having the same views as Nyaya): The world originates out of combinations of atoms. It does not emanate from Brahman.

The white of a white cloth arises from the white of its threads (this is an “emergent property”). How, then, could the inconscient universe arise out of Brahman (who you say is conscient, cit).?

Sankara: What about size on your view? Atoms have, according to you, infinitesimal size. How then do tables and chairs and bodies have a non-infinitesimal size?

However you might explain the possibility, we can say something similar about how it is possible for the inconscient universe to arise out of Brahman.

Furthermore, your view does not explain how there can be action as the result of effort. Effort is a psychological property, on your view, but it is supposed to be responsible for the movement of things made out of atoms (such as arms and other bodily limbs). But how can effort or action enter an object from outside, through a property resting in a self? Atomic things move, but, on your premises, how is movement possible?

Furthermore (I say echoing my Buddhist teachers, who were surely right on this point), how can there be contact between atoms which are said to have no parts? (And if they had parts they would not be “atoms” as you understand them.)

2.2.13.

Furthermore, your notion of inherence is unintelligible (and without this ontological glue your whole system becomes unstuck). What relates inherence to its relata (given aIb, what relates a to I and b to I, blueINHERING-Inlotus, then blue to INHERING-IN, and so on)? There is an impossible endless series of relaters necessary.

2.2.14-15.

There are problems with your view of atoms as permanent and eternal.

2.2.16.

How do you explain the multiple properties of things like tables and chairs and bodies with respect to properties of atoms? You say that atoms are colored, such that the color of the atoms of which something is composed is responsible for the color of the thing. But how about other properties, tastes, smells, etc.? How will you trace them back?

2.2.17.

Vaisesika answer to the attack on inherence: There is no better way to understand relations. What is your alternative view, Advaitin?

Sankara: Relations such as inherence do not exist separately from their relata. We can say that the relation as an effect is a peculiar condition of the relata as cause.

Furthermore, if atoms have size they must have parts. And if they have parts, they must be impermanent (as subject to dissolution).

Our counterposition is that the ultimate dissolution of things with parts has as its substratum (as you see things) or cause the eternal (partless) Brahman.

° ° °

Against the Buddhists, against Nagarjuna’s Madhyamikas (“Everything is empty or void”), Vasubandhu’s Yogacaras (“Everything is mind or consciousness, vijnana”), and the “realist” Sarvastivadins (“Everything is real”):

The Buddhist realists have insuperable difficulties in their positions on the combinations of properties that they say make up a self.

2.2.25

Against all Buddhist views, there is the impossibility of explaining memory. “I who saw you yesterday am remembering you right now.” Buddhist “nihilists” (Nagarjuna’s followers, apparently, but also the other two groups) allow no things that endure.

Buddhist nihilist: Something can come from nothing.

2.2.26

Answer: That does not accord with experience. We experience things arising out of their causes, which are other existing things, like a gold necklace out of gold bars.

If something could come from nothing, then a hare’s horn could be as causally efficacious for anything as a seed for a sprout.

“All things are perceived to exist as positive entities with their respective distinguishing features.”

2.2.27

To the Buddhist who believes that a self can arise out of nothing or a unreal combination of psychological factors, we say: How do you account for responsibility? Why does not the potter reap the rewards of weaver’s efforts, and so on?

(How could we recognize the weaver, say, as the one to whom we owe a bill? Why should we pay this person, since she was not the person who weaved?)

2.2.28

Against Buddhist Idealism (Vasubandhu and company):

External things are not non-existent, since they are perceived. (Everything perceived is not non-existent.)

Example: The self (which is not excluded as part of the paksa or “inferential subject.”)

Vijnanavadin: Nothing is perceived apart from the perceiving.

Sankara: We commonly distinguish perceptions from such things as pillars, walls, etc., which we identity as objects of perception. What non-sense to confuse seeings with things seen!

Furthermore, your objections to the notion that there are external things are intellectual qualms purporting to show impossibility, whereas possibility is shown through perception and the other “means of knowledge” (pramana).

An object such as pot and a cognition such as “That’s a pot” are different things, like other different things, for instance, a white cow and a black cow or the cognition “It’s a white cow” and the cognition “It’s a black cow.”

Buddhist: Cognition is self-revealing. Other things are said to exist only as they are revealed by cognition. You seem to say that we perceive cognitions just like we perceive things. That’s incorrect. If another cognition were required to know a given cognition, there would be required an impossible series and, like a lamp with its light extinguished, there would be no illumining of anything.

Sankara: Awareness of cognition (cognition of cognition, self-awareness, that is) stops the regress. Once self-awareness occurs, no desire to know something further occurs. The self that is aware and the cognition perceived are different, and so a cognition can be perceived (and counted as one thing among many, such as tables and chairs and bodies).

“The self-evident witness cannot be denied.”

Buddhist: “By upholding the theory that the perceiving witness is self-effulgent [self-illumining or self-aware], you only accept under a different garb of words my own view that cognition shines by itself.”

Sankara: No. We all make many distinctions concerning cognitions that we come to know (distinguished according to persons, locations, etc.). We know cognitions by means other than the targets themselves. (The self is self-effulgent, but not cognition.)

2.2.29

Furthermore, waking is not like dreaming. We distinguish veridical experiences in waking from non-veridical dreams in saying such things as, “Falsely did I imagine myself in contact with great men; my mind became overcome by sleep and thus this delusion arose.” We wake up and the impression of such company is sublated by waking experience. But never in waking experience is an experience of a pillar sublated similarly.

We also distinguish remembering from dreaming (in terms of the reality of the objects remembered or dreamt).

2.2.30

The Buddhist theory of samskara-s, “tendencies” or “subliminal impressions” or “memory impressions,” cannot do the work of the assumption of objects as external to consciousness.

2.2.31: On the Buddhist theory, where do the samskara-s reside? (There is nothing to account for the endurance of a “tendency.”)

° ° °

2.2.42-45

Against the Bhagavata theism (a forerunner to Ramanuja):

The Bhagavata view holds that God is both the efficient and material cause of the world (the world is the body of God who is also its shaper).

Bhagavata: This view is stated both in Vedic texts (i.e., the Upanishads) and in Smrti texts (such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana).

Sankara: We are not confident that we count precisely the same texts as authoritative, though doubtless there are many about which we agree.

We also like the devotional practices of the Bhagavatas and would not quarrel with them except unfortunately there is the story of the origin of the individual soul. The individual soul (is Brahman and) does not originate. (What originates can be destroyed, and Brahman cannot be destroyed. Brahman is the self-existent.) The Upanishads say this.

The peculiar scriptures of the Bhagavatas makes statements that would imply complexity within God. These statements stand in flat contradiction with Upanishadic statements that Brahman (God) is one (and homogeneous).