Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/503

This page needs to be proofread.

x] Nature of Illusion 4 8 7 piiral1uirthika or absolute, 'l'Yavahiirika or practical ordinary experience, and priitibhiisika, illusory. The first one represents the absolute truth; the other two are false impressions due to doa. The difference between vyavaharika and pratibhasika is that the do!?a of the vyavaharika perception is neither dis- covered nor removed until salvation, whereas the do!?a of the pratibhasika reality which occurs in many extraneous forms (such as defect of the senses, sleep, etc.) is perceived in the world of our ordinary experience, and thus the pratibhasika experience lasts for a much shorter period than the vyavaharika. But just as the vyavaharika world is regarded as phenomenal modifica- tions of the ajfiana, as apart from our subjective experience and even before it, so the illusion (e.g. of silver in the conch-shell) is also regarded as a modification of avidya, an undefinable creation of the object of illusion, by the agency of the do!?a. Thus in the case of the illusion of silver in the conch-shell, indefinable silver is created by the do!?a in association with the senses, which is called the creation of an indefinable (aJlirvacalliya) silver of illu- sion. Here the cit underlying the conch-shell remains the same but the avidya of antaJ:lkara1).a suffers modifications (Pari?liima) on account of doa, and thus gives rise to the illusory creation. The illusory silver is thus viz'artta (appearance) from the point of view of the cit and pariDama from the point of view of avidya, for the difference between vivartta and pari1).ama is, that in the former the transformations have a different reality from the cause (cit is different from the appearance imposed on it), while in the latter case the transformations have the same reality as the transforming entity (appearance of silver has the same stuff as the avidya whose transformations it is). But now a difficulty arises that if the illusory perception of silver is due to a coalescing of the cit underlying the antaJ:lkara1).a-vftti as modi- fied by doa and the object-cit as underlying the "this" before me (in the illusion of "this is silver"), then I ought to have the: experience that" I am silver" like" I am happy" and not that "this is silver"; the answer is, that as the coalescing takes place in connection with my previous notion as "this," the form of the knowledge also is "this is sih"er," whereas in the notion U I am happy," the notion of happiness takes place in connec- tion with a previous vftti of "I." Thus though the coalescing of the two "cits" is the same in both cases, yet in one cae the