1 - Mahajana.net

INTBODUCTION 23which our speech consists were, according to this theory, not soundsas other sounds and noises are. 1 They were substances sui generis,eternal and ubiquitous, but imperceptible to ordinary men otherwisethan in occasional manifestations. Just as light does not produce, butonly makes manifest the objects upon which it falls, just so our articulationonly makes manifest, but does not produce the sounds of Veda. Thisabsurd idea, assailed by all other orthodox and unorthodox schools, theMimamsakas defended by arguments and sophisms of extraordinarydialectical subtlety. It apparently exhausted all their speculative wits,for in all other problems they maintained the most decidedly realistic,anti-metaphysical, negative position. No God Creator, no OmniscientBeing, no Saints, no mysticism whatsoever, the world as it appears toour senses and nothing more. Therefore, no innate ideas, no constructivecognition, no images, no introspection, a bare consciousness, 2 a tabularasa of sensitivity and memory, which registers and preserves all externalexperiences. The same spirit of super-realism which manifests itself inthe theory of eternal articulate sounds, appears also in the theory ofcomputed rewards. Every partial act of which a complicated sacrificeconsists produces a partial result, 3 the results are then added togetherand produce as a combined reward, 4 that result which was aimed at bythe sacrifice, in their realism and their logic the Mimamsakas werehardly distinguishable from the realistic Nyaya-Vaisesika school, butthe problem of eternal articulate sounds was the point at issue betweenthem. Their most decided opponents were the Buddhists. There is hardlya single point in philosophy in which both these systems would notrepresent the one just the reverse of the other.All these systems of philosophy, however different they be in theirontology, had this feature in common, that their theory of cognitionremained, generally speaking, in the phase of naive realism. EvenVedanta, notwithstanding all its spiritualistic monism, admitted, onthe empirical plane, a realistic theory of the origin of our knowledge.We find the same ray of light travelling towards the object, seizingits form and carrying it back to the Soul of the individual. The factthat this ray of light, this object and this individual Soul are but one1 For the Bhatta-Mimamsakas dhvani is the guna of aka$a, just as withthe Vaisesikas, but varna is a substance, dravya, and it is nitya.2 nirakaram vijndnam.3 bhaga-apurva.* samahara-apurva, cp. on apurxa Goldstiickers's Dictionary.