Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s24.2

Language: English

v2.c26.s24.2.1

When we look at the problem from the objective side, we speak of māyā, and when from the subjective side, we speak of avidyā.² Even as Brahman and Ātman are one, so are māyā and avidyā one. The tendency of the human mind to see what is really one as if it were many, is avidyā; but this is common to all individuals. For when Śaṁkara speaks of avidyā, he means neither yours nor mine. It is an impersonal force which imparts itself to our individual consciousnesses, though it transcends them. For our knowing mechanism operates on things already created, which we perceive but do not make. The world is created by God in the order mentioned in the scriptures and noticed by us.³ Māyā is both subjective and objective, individual and universal, that out of which the conditioned forms of intelligence and of objective existence arise. If that by reason of which the unreal world presents itself as real is purely subjective, then it is mere fancy and cannot be seriously treated as the material cause of the world. If, on the other hand, it is regarded as the material cause of the world, something like the prakṛti of the Sāṃkhya, then it is not mere individual ignorance. The two, the avidyā of the individual and the prakṛti of the Brahman, arise together;

v2.c26.s24.2.2

neither of them is thinkable apart from the other, so that even avidyā is dependent on the ultimate reality.¹ The phenomenal self and the phenomenal world are mutually implicated facts.² Avidyā and prakṛti are co-eternal and belong to the world of experience.³ The space-time-cause world is the view of reality given to us through avidyā, which is adapted to the purpose of presenting us with such a world. Śaṃkara steers clear of mentalism as well as materialism. We cannot say that nature is a phenomenon of our consciousness, any more than the phenomenal self is a product of nature. The conditions of the possibility of objective experience are also the conditions of the possibility of logical selfhood or self-consciousness. Why do our minds work in this misleading way? Why is there avidyā? Why do we have the space-time-cause world? Why is there māyā? are different ways of stating the same insoluble problem. The Ātman, which is pure knowledge, somehow lapses into avidyā, just as Brahman, which is pure being, turns aside into the space-time-cause world. Through avidyā we reach vidyā, even as through the empirical world we reach Brahman. Why there is this universal and primeval turning aside or perversion, is more than we can say, yet we must hold that neither our logical minds nor the world which it apprehends is an illusion. A phenomenon is not a phantasm. Avidyā and māyā represent the subjective and the objective sides of the one fundamental fact of experience.

v2.c26.s24.2.3

It is called avidyā, since it is dissolvable by knowledge; but the objective series is called māyā, since it is coeternal with the supreme personality. Śaṁkara admits its existence even in the state of pralaya or destruction. Īśvara, the omniscient, who controls his māyā, has no avidyā, and if Śaṁkara here and there lends countenance to a different theory, it is in the figurative sense that Īśvara has the power which leads to avidyā in the individual. The Sāṁkhya thinkers did not admit the existence of an Īśvara, but the empirical world was traced to a primeval avidyā which is said to be beginningless. Avidyā is a quality of buddhi, and therefore must reside in buddhi, and logic requires that the beginningless nature of avidyā must be attributed to its locus in buddhi also. So buddhi becomes a manifestation of prakṛti, the fundamental object or root-substance. The objectivity of avidyā is thus safeguarded. Vivaraṇaprameyasaṁgraha says: "Avidyā no doubt constitutes a defect in consciousness in so far as it impedes the presentation of non-duality and gives rise to the presentation of duality; but, on the other hand, it constitutes an excellence since it forms the material cause, and thus renders possible the cognition of Brahman."¹ The finiteness is necessary before we can reach the infinite.