Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s3.15

c15.s3.15

The second advance may be attributed more surely to a section of the school.³ It appears to have faced the problem of self-consciousness with more than usual boldness, and to have discarded the old and complicated effort to hold that in some manner, decidedly difficult to understand, the succeeding moment was conscious of the preceding moment and so generated a sort of self-consciousness.⁴ The arguments by which they established their view seem to have been based on similes, whence their style ‘masters of similes’ (*dārṣṭāntikas*). The fact of the experience of memory: ‘I have seen’ suggests the possibility of knowledge of the self; the lamp sheds light on the jar, but equally lights up itself; the word at one and the same moment conveys the sense, which it has, and the sounds, of which it is composed. Consciousness, therefore, can be and is self-conscious, and this fact explains the doctrine that perception of external things is only indirect. The naïve idea that consciousness is in direct contact with reality is discarded for the more complicated conception that the external reality is known because consciousness takes through the medium of the sense organism the form of the object, and then is conscious of itself; that objects are external is recognized because of the temporary and accidental character of the objects of consciousness, which shows that they are not essentially parts of consciousness itself.