Mandukya Karika of Gaudapad IV.26
“Consciousness has no contact with objects; so also it has certainly no contact with appearances of objects. For according to the reasons adduced, an object has no existence, and an illusory object is not separate from the awareness.”
Here Gaudapada is taking the view as only Pure Consciousness exists in reality and there is nothing but it any division in it suggested by the fact of perception is not ultimately true. He puts it thus:
“From the standpoint of reality, that is to say, of ultimate Reality. For unlike the existence of a buffalo independently of a horse, a jar does not exist apart from clay, after being recognised as clay that it really is, nor does a cloth exist apart from the yarns, nor the yarns apart from the fibres. Thus if the reality is pursued successively till words and notions cease, we do not perceive any external occasion for knowledge.”
(Sankara’s commentary on G.K. IV.25)
In that extreme reduction Gaudapada differs from Sankara who held to different levels of discourse that could be separated. It is important to not that in his Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya he started out with the natural and inevitable Subject Object division given in experience. Nevertheless in some discussions of Advaita it is forgotten that conceptual categories alter as the analysis of perception progresses.
Take for example the esoteric conception of perception as the mind going out to the object and taking its form. The reasoning behind it is that superimposition must be taking place where the object is and as the object is ‘out there’ that’s where the superimposition must be happening. Here the mingling of two levels is patent. You have the material and the immaterial, the object and the knowledge of the object. The knowledge is the immaterial factor. Recollect that the apparent impossibility of the mingling of the material and the immaterial or the extended and the un- extended is the aporia that launched the preamble discussion to the B.S.Bh. Recollect too that ‘the immaterial is indivisible’ (Aristotle) and ask yourself what sense is there to the spatial metaphor of the mind going out to anything. In knowledge there is no distance as it were, the blending of the upadhis of the mind and the object does not take place in any sort of container. The vritti or mental modification is the precipitate in the mind of the subject superimposed there and creating the illusion of a permanent self.
Indeed though Gaudapada’s rigourous approach may be excessive we ought still to alter our categories as our analysis deepens.
