Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c22.s5.22

c22.s5.22

The attempt to deduce the external world from mental impressions is also refuted. It involves an idle regressus ad infinitum in order to avoid the normal admission that impressions are derived from external things. Moreover, it is impossible for any impression to be left when there is no permanent substratum like a self on which the impression is to be recorded. If the receptacle intellect (ālayavijñāna) is put forward as the substratum, then the Buddhist either contradicts the doctrine of momentariness and supplies a quasi-self, or, if he maintains momentariness of this intellect also, his position is impossible; remembrance, recognition, and so on require some permanent reality. Recognition of ‘this’ as similar to ‘that’ cannot be made without the presence of a self which can remember and compare; recognition of a thing as the same attests also the permanence of the object, and is illustrated completely by the recognition of the permanence of the self on which no one is mistaken.² The Vijñānavāda, therefore, is no more tenable than the view of the realists which fails utterly to account for the existence of the aggregates making up the self, which advances a theory of causation absurd on account of the parallel theory of momentariness, and which asserts the origin of existence from non-existence, while at the same time it holds that all mental complexes are derived from the four psychical aggregates and material complexes from the atoms. The Madhyamaka doctrine fares even worse, being dismissed contemptuously on the ground that its tenet of vacuity is contradicted by every means of knowledge.¹