Perception in Gaudapada and David Hume - Paradoxes of Idealism

 II.15 M.K.: Those objects that appear as obscure inside the mind and those that appear as vivid outside, are all merely created by imagination.  Their distinction is to be traced to the difference in the organs of perception.

If there was ever an indication that Vedantins aren’t from Mars it is this.  The tendency to idealism brings to the fore the notion that it is only a matter of vividness that marks the difference between the imagination and perception.  This is to be found in Hume.  A similar epistemology will evoke a related  response to the problem of differentiation between the mental and the sensible.  Impressions and ideas together are perception, is how Hume  puts it.  So how does one distinguish them?  By their relative vivacity. 

The notion of vivacity comes up in Sankara’s commentary on the sutra only to be dismissed. 

“The fact that things in the mind, called up by mere mental impressions, have an obscurity, while externally as objects of the sense of sight etc., they have a vividness, (that fact) is not due to the existence of the objects themselves; for this distinction is noticed even in a dream.  To what is it due then?  This is caused by the difference in the organs of perception.  Hence it is proved that the things of the waking state are as much a creation of imagination as the dream objects.” M.K. II.15.

Obviously there is a difference between their views on the  ontological status of perceptions.  Gaudapada holds that because we have perceptions in dreams and perceptions in the waking state the common denominator of being perceptions is their true status.  They thus remain as items in consciousness.  The activity of the senses is also in consciousness. So all being in consciousness and  consciousness qua consciousness resulting from superimposition (adhyasa) all experience is mithya/false. 

Hume  bundles mental and sensible events  into the one category of perception but distinguishes between the constituent impressions and ideas by virtue of their relative vivacity.

It’s interesting to see how the attempts to fix the paradoxes, that arise from the adherence to Idealism, criss cross each other generating  bafflement. 

Bhagavad Gita 9:4/5 — Necessary and Contingent

 

You will have been told by those anxious to place Advaita in recognisable categories that it is essentially pantheistic, monistic, panentheistic, or indeed, in the popular formula  - All is One.  The relation between the Creator and the Created is a subtle one in the Bhagavad Gita.  Two citations in Chapter 9 are apposite:

B.G. 9:4

This whole world is pervaded by Me in My unmanifest form. All beings exist in Me, but I am not contained in them!

B.G. 9:5

5. Nor do the beings dwell in Me. Behold My divine Yoga! I am the sustainer and originator of beings, but My Self is not contained in the beings.

What can be taken from these two sutras is the contingent nature of creation.  It might not have been, but it is.  Contingent being requires something more than itself to continue in existence.  That must be a necessary being which sustains by its nature the contingent.  Obviously contingent beings are not one with the necessary.  They are in it by virtue of being but not of it.

In Sankara''s commentary he states that being a thing means being a something distinct from other things.

“Therefore, being possessed of their reality through Me, who am their Self, they exist in me.  Hence they are said to be established in Me.”

Obviously these sutras rule out pantheism or the notion that God and the universe are identical.  Panentheism or the idea that out of the nature of God the universe arose in a quasi necessary way must also fail to pass the advaitic test..

Gaudapada with his ajativada (unborn) doctrine would probably say that contingent being is non-being and that only being exists.  What does not have being of its nature i.e. necessary being, cannot come to pass.  Somewhat annihilating!

Asparsa Yoga & The Mind going out to the Object of Perception

 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.

Was Gaudapada an Idealist?

Was Gaudapada an idealist as many scholars have asserted? Without going into the knotty questions as to what sort of idealism it was that he might or might not have been; I think it more fruitful to ask - what did Gaudapada aim at in his inquiry.

Let’s have a cup of chai and focus on this. In his own way he was a strict eliminativist. What is it that’s left and cannot be denied if one ignores the differences between the various modes of consciousness?What but consciousness itself which is never not ‘on’ even in Deep Dreamless Sleep (sushipti). The latter observation is very important in the thought of Sankara. Gaudapada threw all states and modes of consciousness into the pot and distilled their essence to find the unchanging, unborn, pure, consciousness. This and not a quasi method of doubt is the source of such verses as IV. 41: (Karikas)

As some one, owing to lack of discrimination, may, in the waking state, be in contact with unthinkable objects, fancying them to be real, so also in dream, one sees the objects in that dream alone, owing to lack of discrimination.

To say that Gaudapada was an ‘illusionist’ is to escape the gravamen of his case against trying to find ultimate reality within the data of awareness. He never leaves off his ontologically eliminativist cap but can recognise that there are grades of realisation:

IV.42:
Instruction about creation has been imparted by the wise for the sake of those who , from the facts of experience and adequate behaviour, vouch for the existence of substantiality, and who are ever afraid of the birthless entity.

Sankara in his commentary adds to his observation that:

That creation has been preached as a means to an end (for generating firm discrimination) under the idea: “Let them accept it for the time being. But in the course of practising Vedanta, the discriminating knowledge about the birthless and non-dual Self will arise in them spontaneously."

So it looks like Idealism, talks like Idealism but doesn’t walk like Idealism. The world is a given yes, but a given open to ontological question.

Gaudapada takes a Berkeleyan Turn

In accord with the perception of its cause, knowledge is supposed to be based on external objects. But from the standpoint of reality, it is held that the external cause is no cause. (G.K. IV.25)

There is an intimation here of the advanced position of what I have been calling 'non-numerical identity' between the object and the vritti. An object in this sense is not the cause of itself. The initial stage is of course the classical causal therory of perception.

Meaning : "The Chitta (mind) does not touch the object ; for that reason only it does not touch the Arthabhasa (the reflection or appearance of an object). For, Padartha (an object) is verily Abhuta (not really existing) ; therefore, apart from it Arthiibhasa also does not exist." (Translation or import of 4: 26 Gaudapada Karikas from The Essence of Gaudapada by Sri S.S.S.)

"Consciousness has no contact with objects; so also it has certainly no contact with appearances of objects. For according to the reason adduced, an object has no existence, and an illusory object is not separate from the awareness". (Swami Gambhirananda trans. Advaita Ashrama pub.)

Gaudapada is here ascribing an Berkeleyan turn to the Vijnanavadin and in the subsequent verse takes their position to its inevitable conclusion:

Consciousness does not ever come in contact with external objects in all the three states. There being no external objects how can there be any base false apprehension of it.

In Sankara's own critique of the Vijnanavadin position he uses that point. (cf. B.S.B. II.ii.28) In his commentary on the Mandukya Karika of Gaudapada he states:

The text starting with, "In compliance with the perceptions of its cause, Knowledge" (IV.25) and ending with the previous verse, which represents the view of the subjective idealists among the Buddhists, is approved by the teacher (Gaudapada) in so far as it refutes the view of those who believe in external objects. Now he makes use of that very argument (of the idealists) as a ground of inference for demolishing their own points of view:

Hence consciousness has no birth, and things perceived by it do not pass into birth. Those who perceive the birth of that consciousness, may as well see footmarks in space itself. (G.K. IV.28)

The upshot is that nothing gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness always is - unborn or ajati. Even if wholly wrong the vijnavadin is half right.a

Richard King on Asparsa Yoga in Gaudapada's Karikas (Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism)

Writing on Asparsa Yoga: the Gaudapadian Phenomenology of Perception:

Perception is base upon the possibility of contact (sparsa) between a perceiver and a perceived object. An attack upon this notion then is fundamental to an attack upon all “realist” theories of perception. The Nyaya Sutra, for instance, defines perception (pratyaksa) as “the determinate, unnamed, and unerring knowledge which arises from the contact of a sense organ with its object.” This is an inherently dualistic understanding of experience and as such is clearly unacceptable to the non-dualistic authors of the Gaudapadiya Karikas. An attack upon the notion of “contact” is fundamental to a thorough-going non-dual theory of perception. In fact, it is the GK’s position that:

“Consciousness does not make contact with an object, not even with the appearance of an object. In fact, the object is unreal, and the appearance of the object is non different. (GK IV.26)

(pg.154 Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism by Richard King)

There is a dense tangle of non-dual epistemology here. What we are immediately aware of is the mental modification (vritti) ‘caused’ by the object. In that sense we are not in contact with the object. But we are also aware of the object as it is because the same reality is fundamental to the vritti and the object. The object is a form of limitation of Consciousness (an upadhi) and it is this which allows it to be superimposed on the consciousness of the perceiver. The ‘unreality’ of the object, for Gaudapada, is due to the fact that it can be sublated. It is not changeless. Objects in the dream world on waking and illusory objects in the waking state are sublated because they are ultimately only true or real as consciousness. In fact the fundamental reality is Pure Consciousness, a boundless (anantam) unity of being in which there is no separation and therefore no contact (sparsha).

It is non-duality which makes perception possible, what Vedanta Paribhasa calls perceptuality. Non-duality makes duality and veridical perception possible to put it aporetically. In disagreeing with King on this point I believe that I am tracing Gaudapada’s core insight which was explicated by Sankara particularly in the preamble to his commentary on the Brahma Sutras.

Sri SSS on Gaudapada

A great teacher whose name I forget said that in the great city of Mumbai (Bombay) there were 6 seekers who understood Advaita. As I am no longer living there itself there must be 5 now. Seriously, the difference between the Buddhist doctrine of Sunya and the Ajativada propounded by Gaudapada is that each successive level of realisation is absorbed or sublated by a greater reality using the adhyaropa /apavada dialectic. The Buddhist sunya is accomplished in one rapture. This is my present understanding which may be altered by my next meeting with the panc rishi. Here is a summary of the procedure given by Sri SSS in The Essence of Gaudapada

Even so, for the sake or benefit of those seekers who are endowed with limited or low-grade intelligence (discriminative faculty) and are having predominantly an extroverted view, point, the Sruti, adopting tile ancient time-tested traditional methodology of 'Adhyaropa Apavada Nyaya' (axiom of Superimposition and Rescission), deliberately superimposes on It certain Dharmas (special features or attributes) which do not really exist in It and relatively rescinds certain other Dharmas, showing that they do not exist in It. Those preceptors who are well-versed in this traditional methodology of teaching are utilizing as an aid to this teaching the empirical logical arguments (Loukika Tarka) in consonance with that methodology.

With this very purport in mind the knowers of the Sampradaya (traditional methodology of spiritual instruction) have stated : -(GIta Bhashya, 13-12), meaning -"By virtue of the axiom of Adhyaropa-Apavada (Superimposition and Rescission) tre Tattwa (Reality) which is Nishprapaiicha (devoid of any world of duality) is taught in full detail." (Doubt) : Even if it is so, does not the defect of having uttered a lie entail them ? Even though the phenomenon of birth does not really exist, they have taught that it exists, is it not so ? (Solution) : Not so. For, they have not at all instructed, preached so in the Paramarthika . (Absolute) sense. Although the Shishyas (disciples) have believed firmly that the Dvaitavastu really exists, in the Absolute sense, none of tIle Dvaita-Vikalpas (misconceptions of duality) of the type -'Sastra', 'Sllishya', 'Guru' etc. does exist whatsoever in reality ; this alone is the ParamaItha Siddhanta (the Absolute philosophical or spiritual teaching of Advaita Vedanta

(page 531)