A History of Indian Philosophy v4.c38.s2.49.3

v4.c38.s2.49.3

What Vyāsa-tīrtha wants to convey by all this is that, even if the Upaniṣads proclaim the identity of Brahman and the world, not only does such an identity go against Śaṅkara’s accepted thesis that the world is unreal and untrue and hence cannot be identified with Brahman, but his explanation that “identity” means illusory imposition (*āropa*) is unacceptable, since no one thinks the conch-shell to be identical with its illusory imposed silver. There are no grounds for holding that knowledge of the basis should necessarily involve knowledge of the imposed, and so the former cannot be considered as the essence of the latter; and the knowledge of earth does not remove the knowledge of jug, etc., nor does knowledge of earth imply knowledge of its form as jug¹. Jaya-tīrtha in his *Nyāya-sudhā* on this topic formulates the causal doctrine of the Madhva school as being *bhedābheda* theory, which means that effect is in some ways identical with cause and in other ways different. Thus it opposes both the extremes—the complete difference of cause and effect as in Nyāya, and their complete identity as in Śaṅkara or the Sāṃkhya. He argues that, if the effect were already existing identical with the cause, then that also would be existent previously in its cause, and so on till the original root cause is reached.