A la Samuel Johnson - ‘Thus I refute thee’ of the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley. It sounds like that, because in both the translations of the adhyasa bhasya (Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya) at my disposal the declaration of the foundational externality of perception is declared emphatically.
(a) It being established etc. (Swami Gambhirananda)
(b)It is not a matter requiring any proof etc. (George Thibaut)
Then there is the paradox that this externality, which is so patent that it does not require proof, comes burdened with the aporetic: how does that object out there, a material entity, come to be somehow inside me as a cognition which we intuitively accept as a true picture of what the object is.
No wonder the idealist says ‘stop, there is no outside and externality is an illusion’ and by the great razor of Occam this is the simplest explanation. That only leaves one with the difficulty of an illusion of something that has never occurred. A rare beast indeed.
Sankara declares that externality (a) should be impossible; (b) it would be wrong, given the aporia/impasse just detailed. Nevertheless it is so. Let us describe what seems to be taking place and work from there towards a transcendental hypothesis which accounts ontologically for it. This is a ‘saving the appearances’ operation and is begun with the concept of superimposition viz. adhyasa.
More anon.
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