Outlines of Indian Philosophy c19.80.1

c19.80.1

The view that knowledge arises through a psychic medium (buddhi-vṛtti) may easily lead to subjective idealism as it does in the Yogācāra school; but the Sāṅkhya-Yoga lays down a postulate at the very outset that all knowledge necessarily points to some object outside it. Belief in the plurality of selves which is an essential part of the doctrine furnishes a support for the postulate, since the agreement between what different people experience may be taken to vouch for the existence of a common or trans-subjective basis for it all.¹ The psychic medium accordingly is here but a connecting link between the knower and the known and does not displace the latter (p. 206). A natural corollary to this view is the correspondence theory of truth. That knowledge is true in which the form assumed by the buddhi rightly represents the object perceived. This is the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika view as well; only the theory of representative ideas (vṛttis) is not accepted there. A more important difference between the two is that whereas in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika which makes the manas merely the pathway of knowledge, knowledge is supposed ordinarily to show objects as they are, there is here no guarantee that it does so.