Indian Philosophy v1.c7.s2.26

v1.c7.s2.26

How are we to account for the world? The empirical variety is there bound in space, time and cause. If the self is the one, the universal, the immutable, we find in the world a mass of particulars with opposed characters. We can only call it the not-self, the object of a subject. In no case is it real. The principal categories of the world of experience, time, space and cause are self-contradictory. They are relative terms depending on their constituents. They have no real existence. Yet they are not non-existent. The world is there, and we work in it and through it. We do not and cannot know the why of this world. It is this fact of its inexplicable existence that is signified by the word māyā. To ask what is the relation between the absolute self and the empirical flux, to ask why and how it happens, that there are two, is to assume that everything has a why and a how. To say that the infinite becomes the finite or manifests itself as finite is on this view utter nonsense. The limited cannot express or manifest the unlimited. The moment the unlimited manifests itself in the limited, it itself becomes limited. To say that the absolute degenerates or lapses into the empirical is to contradict its absoluteness. No lapse can come to a perfect being. No darkness can dwell in perfect light. We cannot admit that the supreme, which is changeless, becomes limited by changing. To change is to desire or to feel a want, and it shows lack of perfection. The absolute can never become an object of knowledge, for what is known is finite and relative. Our limited mind cannot go beyond the bounds of time, space and cause, nor can we explain these, since every attempt to explain them assumes them. Through thought, which is itself a part of the relative world, we cannot know the absolute self. Our relative experience is a waking dream. Science and logic are parts of it and products of it too. This failure of metaphysics is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed over, neither to be praised nor blamed, but understood. With a touching humility born of intellectual strength, a Plato, or a Nāgārjuna, a Kant or a Śaṃkara, declares that our thought deals with the relative, and has nothing to do with the absolute.