Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c21.s2.32

c21.s2.32

Nor is there any force in the contention⁴ that self-consciousness is necessary to explain memory, since how else can we remember a thought? The answer is that, when an object has been perceived, there arises memory of it, and by association also of the perception of which it was the object. Equally impossible is it to strengthen the case by the power possessed in certain cases of magic to perceive the thought of another; by the use of certain unguents one can see a buried treasure, but another’s consciousness is, like it, essentially something different from one’s own consciousness. The further contention—that of Dignāga—that, if consciousness cannot know itself, it equally cannot know any object, and all experience is thus impossible, is denied; the Vijñānavāda by its effort to establish a relation between the true reality, void consciousness, and experience falls into hopeless difficulties; the Madhyamaka admits perception, inference, and authority as sources of experience,¹ but it asserts that on a critical examination the whole fabric of experience proves incapable of being sustained. Consciousness and its object cannot be identical, else there would be no subject and object; they cannot be different, since *ex hypothesi* there exists only consciousness; they cannot be both or neither, for these views are contradictory; in truth an unreal object is seen, an unreal consciousness sees. It is idle to argue that the unreal world of experience (*saṃsāra*) must have a foundation in the reality of void thought; the relation between unreal and real is unintelligible; the unreal cannot be stirred to activity by the real. It is equally wrong to talk of void consciousness, if there exist in it tendencies to create the distinction of subject and object.