Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c14.17

c14.17

The idea of the actual relation between the dēva and the tree is of a mystical character. The anti-realism of Indian philosophy makes it possible for the most intellectual minds to accept the possibility of other worlds and other beings than those we call material; for even to the material world a merely relative reality is granted,—the phenomenal world exists at all, only in so far as it exists in relation to a mind, and to none of us is it the same identically. Hence the impossibility of questioning the ‘reality’ of another man’s subjective experience, or denying the possible existence of beings of many orders, having a reality as great, but no greater than that of this phenomenal world.