Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s5.3

c15.s5.3

There are two obvious Nyāya objections to such a statement which Ratnakīrti seeks to meet. The first is that, as capacity is regarded as existence, it becomes impossible to know anything, since capacity cannot be known until the effect is known, and the effect in turn cannot be known until its effect is known and so on to infinity, a fatal objection in the Nyāya view. Secondly, momentariness negates the existence of any permanent perceiver of change, and destroys the possibility of inference which the Buddhists admit. The reply to the former contention is an appeal to the facts; the existence of seeds means no more than the capacity of producing shoots; even if the capacity is itself dependent on a further capacity, still the fact is undeniable, and there is no objection to an infinity which is in accord with reality. Nor is there any force in the objection that a cause such as a seed must wait for a number of subsidiary conditions, e. g. water, earth, &c., before it can produce the shoot; the true view is that the seed-moment produces the conditions as well as the shoot, its potency to do so being explained by earlier causal moments on which it depends; this comprehensive power may be illustrated by the analogy of the single perceptual moment which reveals a large number of objects. The second set of objections is rejected as equally unsound. Facts show that under certain conditions there is knowledge of concomitance either positive or negative; granting that the knowledge is subsequent to the concomitance, nevertheless it holds within itself the experience of the preceding moment, and this serves to supply the place of a permanent observer. The existence of concomitance also is possible, not because there are permanent entities, but because of the extreme similarity of the momentary existences concerned.