30 Ernest Wood, The Occult Training of the Hindus (Madras, Ganesh and Co., 1931), p. 17.

their thirst for pleasure. Disliking or aversion is the inverse of liking; it is the rejection of things which appear to be painful. Patanjali believes that both good and evil often come disguised. Clinging to life is fear of physical death and love of life, which ex­presses itself in acts of self-preservation with no regard for the quality of the life that is preserved. Yoga per se can begin after an attack has been made on these afflictions. The attempt to deal with the afflictions is called "preliminary yoga".

The remainder of chapter two of the Yoga Sutras is devoted to the eight parts or limbs (ahgas) of the yoga discipline. These are eight stages through which the seeker progresses on his way to ultimate liberation from the clutches of nature. The first five exer­cises are means of restraining the mind by physical devices. The first demands that the yogi be obedient to the moral law: he is not to kill, lie, steal, have sexual intercourse, nor have possessions. The second limb requires obedience to the spiritual law: he must be pure in mind and body, be content, practice ascetism, study sacred books, and be devoted to God. These two parts are de­signed to overcome the egoistic tendencies of man. Patanjali sug­gests that if an individual has difficulty in any of these sub­divisions of the first two exercises, he should not attempt to fight by frontal attack; instead he should attempt to substitute a good attitude with an evil one, for example, if he is moved to hatred toward a person, let him direct his mind to considering the good characteristics of this person. The third stage is concerned with posture. No particular posture is necessary, other than that it be one that is easy and one that can be held steadily. Since the time of Patanjali yogis have worked out a number of preferred pos­tures. Regulation of breath is the fourth limb. Through the years the Indian yogis have perfected a wide variety of forms of breath­ing. Most of these are built on the general principle of deep steady breathing with the time of exhalation prolonged beyond that of the time of inhalation. Step five is abstraction, a state in which the senses do not come into contact with their objects, a blocking of the senses from their customary mirroring of the objective world. At the end of the fifth stage the yogi has progressed through ethical preparation, body-control, breath-control, and

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sense-control. Now he is ready for the three exercises designed to produce mind-control.

The last three stages are called concentration, contemplation, and meditative trance. The group name for the three is samyama (inner discipline). This is a state in which the body is still, but the mind is engaged in a state of great activity. "That which appears to be the stillness of Samddhi is perhaps the highest activity pos­sible. Even what is called one-pointedness is itself a state of up­most activity. When the mind is one-pointed it does not mean that one idea is indelibly impressed on the mind like an engraving on a stone, but that the mind is working so quickly that the image of one is formed in no time as it were, destroyed in no time as it were, and formed again."^;il Insofar as one can distinguish these three stages at all, one can say that concentration means holding the mind steadily in a particular physical spot, contemplation means having an unbroken current of thought on one abstract idea, and the meditative trance means that state in which the hiatus between knower and known has been bridged. At last the knower knows the known, because he is the known. Thinker and object of thought are the same. This state is not one which every person can obtain, nor is it one which is likely to be held for long periods of time; but for those who have attained to it, it is the supreme moment, since for them the gunas are inoperative. They have found the way to absolute freedom.

³¹ Shrisha Chandra Vasu in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with the Commentary of Vyasa and the Gloss of Vachaspati Mishra. The Sacred Books of the Hindus, Vol. 4 (Allahabad, The Panini Office, 1910), p. ix.

V. THE SELF IN NYAYA-VAISESIKA

Philosophers can be classified into two types, the analytic and the synthetic. Analytic philosophers are chiefly concerned with the examination of ideas for clarity, consistency, and meaningfulness; synthetic philosophers seek comprehensiveness, fruitfulness, and integration. Analysts disinfect ideas to destroy the false, the con­fused, and the meaningless; synthesists bring ideas together into creative wholes.

The Nyaya philosophers were analytic. They sought to deter­mine the conditions of correct thinking and the means for ac­quiring dependable knowledge about the world. The word Nyaya means an argument by which one is led to a conclusion. Although right reasoning was from the first the chief concern of the Nyaya philosophers, they never lost sight of the fact that they philoso­phized to liberate man from the suffering which all Indian philos­ophers believed to be inherent in human life. The first sentence of the Nyaya Sutras of Gotama, the founder of the Nyaya philosophy, states that logic is pursued because of its utility in fostering "su­preme felicity". The Nyaya and the Vaisesika are regarded as sister schools of philosophy. Vaisesika might be described as the theory of reality which gives completeness to the Nyaya theory of knowledge. Since the tenth century the two have been formally linked. The joining of the two reflects the Indian belief that both analysis and system are needed. System without analysis is blind; analysis without system is empty. To put this wisdom in a mytho­logical context: when Siva dances, he both destroys and creates. Nyaya was not received with immediate favor by the orthodox philosophers because the system relied entirely upon reasoning;

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The Self in Nyaya-Vai&esika

79

but later when the Nyaya logicians found room for revelations from the Vedas, even Brahmins accepted the principles of Nyaya. The logic of this system became the fundamental method of philo­sophical research and the technique for the defense and explica­tion of philosophical doctrines. Thus Nyaya became assimilated into the other systems and gave to Indian systems a compactness of argument seldom found in Western systems of philosophy.

According to the Nyaya philosophy knowledge is the manifesta­tion of objects. Knowledge reveals objects. Knowing alters objects no more than a flashlight alters the objects upon which its beam of light is cast. When the manifestation agrees with the nature of the object, the knowledge is said to be true. The test of the truth of knowledge is the application of the knowledge. True knowledge leads to successful activity; false knowledge leads to failure. There are four dependable ways of acquiring knowledge: perception, in­ference, analogy, and verbal testimony. The organs of perception are the five external senses and one internal sense, the mind (manas), which perceives qualities such as cognition, desire, aver­sion, volition, pain, and pleasure. "Perception is that knowledge which arises from the contact of a sense with its object." * This contact is an actual material contact; sight, hearing, and smell are assumed to be as much in contact with their objects as are taste and touch. Perceptual errors are due to the presence of conditions which cause the object to be associated with characteristics is does not actually have. Inference - the Sanskrit word for inference means after knowledge — is a form of knowing which follows some other knowledge, that is, inference is a process by which one passes from some possessed knowledge to new knowledge by means of a medium shared by the two items of knowledge. This, of course, is none other than the familiar syllogism of Western thought, although the Indian syllosgism, unlike the Aristotelian syllogism, puts the conclusion of the syllogism first, for example, "There is fire on that hill, because there is smoke, and whatever

¹ The Nyaya Sutras of Gotama, translated by S. C. Vidyabhusana. Sacred Books of the Hindus, Vol. 8 (Allahabad, The Panini Office, 1930), I. 1.4. All quotations from the Nyaya Sutras in this chapter are from the Vidya­bhusana translation.

smokes is on fire", rather than "Whatever smokes is on fire; the hill is smoking; hence the hill is on fire." The Indian arrangement of the syllogism has the merit of pointing out that the syllogism is an instrument of proof rather than an instrument of discovery. Another difference between the Nyaya syllogism and the syllogism as it is usually treated in the West is that the mental operations in the Nyaya syllogism include both deduction and induction, for, in the words of the Nyaya Sutras, inference is "knowledge which is preceded by perception".² Analogy or comparison is "the knowl­edge of a thing through its similarity to another thing previously well known".³ No other school of Indian philosophy asserts com­parison as a separate way of knowing. Verbal testimony is "the instructive assertion of a reliable person".⁴ There are two kinds of testimony: the scriptural testimony which is infallible by its nature, and the secular testimony which may or may not be true. The Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophy assumes that the objects which are manifested by means of perception, inference, analogy, and testimony exist independently of the knowing relationship. Also it holds that these real objects are knowable. In this system to say that something is unknowable is to deny that it exists. On object may be unknown, but it cannot both be and be unknowable. Nyaya-Vaisesika is an unqualified realism. The objects of experi­ence also exist independently of each other; in other words, Nyaya-Vaisesika has a pluralistic view of the world. The things of experience are classified differently by the Nyaya philosophers and by the Vaisesika philosophers. According to the Vaisesika philosophers there are seven categories of reality: substance, qual­ity, action, generality, particularity, inherence, and non-existence. The Naiyayikas identify sixteen categories: means of right knowl­edge, object of right knowledge, doubt, purpose, familiar instance, established tenet, members of a syllogism, confutation, ascertain­ment, discussion, wrangling, cavil, fallacy, quibble, futility, and occasion for rebuke. A comparison of these two classifications shows that Vaisesika is concerned with things as such, whereas

² Nyaya Sutras, I. 1. 5.

³ Nyaya Sutras, I. 1. 6.

⁴ Nyaya Sutras, I. 1. 7.

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