The History of Buddhist Thought c26.29

c26.29

The *Laṅkāvatāra*, like all monistic systems, finds its chief difficulty in explaining the relation of the many to the one. It resorts to similes, it explains that words are not the highest reality, and teaches that the truth is to be reached by direct realization. The Mādhyamikas had been able to deny the reality of all sense experience by showing the contradictions which resulted in any attempt to express it verbally. Their success depended on their assumption that the verbal expressions were the accurate and complete representation of the experience. Their tenet of an absolute reality did not really result from their dialectic. It was an unquestioned assumption which had lain there all along. It was so also in the *Laṅkāvatāra*, but there it was a positive conception, and it was asserted to be related in some way to the world of unreality. But it was a conception of an absolute unity, not a unity like the ego of Fichte, in which the difference of ego and non-ego was implicit. Hence every appearance of difference or differentiation had to be explained as being illusion, and reality as being beyond the reach of thought. Such idealism, like other Indian idealistic systems, does not look to find reality in the fullest and most harmonious statement of the facts of experience, but in emphasizing one fact (itself an abstraction), and in brushing away the rest as illusion.