Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/277

VII] Ignorance and Illusion 261 Yoga holds a slightly different view and supposes that the purua not only fails to distinguish the difference between it- self and the buddhi but positively takes the transformations of buddhi as its own. It is no non-perception of the difference but positively false knowledge, that we take the purua to be that which it is not (anyatlulkhyati). It takes the changing, impure, sorrowful, and objective prakfti or buddhi to be the changeless, pure, happiness-begetting subject. It wrongly thinks buddhi to be the self and regards it as pure, permanent and capable of giving us happiness. This is the avidya of Yoga. A buddhi associated with a purua is dominated by such an avidya, and when birth after birth the same buddhi is associated with the same purua, it cannot easily get rid of this avidya. If in the meantime pralaya takes place, the buddhi is submerged in the prakfti, and the avidya also sleeps with it. When at the beginning of the next creation the individual buddhis associated with the puruas emerge, the old avidyas also become manifest by virtue of it and the buddhis associate themselves with the puruas to which they were attached before the pralaya. Thus proceeds the course of sarpsara. When the a vidya of a person is rooted out by the rise of true knowledge, the buddhi fails to attach itself to the purua and is forever dissociated from it, and this is the state of mukti. The Cognitive Process and some characteristics of Citta. It has been said that buddhi and the internal objects have evolved in order to giving scope to the experience of the puru!:,a. What is the process of this experience? Sarpkhya (as explained by Vacaspati) holds that through the senses the buddhi comes into touch with external objects. At the first moment of this touch there is an indeterminate consciousness in which the parti- culars of the thing cannot be noticed. This is called nirvikalpa pratyaka (indeterminate perception). At the next moment by the function of the sa1!zkalpa (synthesis) and vikalpa (abstraction or imagination) of manas (mind-organ) the thing is perceived in all its determinate character; the manas differentiates, integrates, and associates the sense-data received through the senses, and is the cause of illusion; it is therefore called the akhycUi (non-apprehension) theory of illusion which must be distinguished from the allyathakhyiiti (misapprehension) theory of illusion of Yoga which consists in positively misapprehending one (e.g. the rope) for the other (e.g. snake). Yogaviirttika, I. 8.