Nyāya-bindu Tikā

The Result of the Act of Cognising

Lectures 1 – 5, 2nd week, pp.38-42

SYNOPSIS

Dharmakirti refutes those divergent opinions (vipratipatti) or wrong views which assume a
difference between pramāṇa (valid cognition) and pramāṇa phala (result of valid cognition),
pramā and pramāṇa.

18. tad eva ca pratyakṣam jñānam pramāṇa phalam.

This direct cognition itself is the result of cognizing. (p. 38)

The author assumes two stages in perception, namely, the indefinite moment of sensation and the
distinct perceptual cognition. The first moment is the cause and the following cognition is the
result. But here the author opposes the realist distinction between act of cognition and its
content. According to the realists first the senses ‘grasp’ and then they convey the ‘grasped’ form
to the mind and then it reaches the soul. But according to Dharmakirti, these are not distinct,
rather every act of cognizing is self-conscious and perception is reflexive.

According to the realists like Nyāya and Mīmāmsā there is a distinction between the act of
knowledge and its content. This view is based on an analogy between cognition and physical
action. They believe that in every act of cognition there is an agent, an instrument, an object and
a process. For example, when a tree is cut down, the person who cuts the tree is the agent, the
tree is the object, the axe is the instrument, and the procedure is ‘hitting by the axe’. The result
is_ the tree is cut down. In a similar way, when a patch of colour is cognized by a person, his
soul is the agent, colour is the object, visual sense-organ is the instrument and the procedure is
the ray of light travelling from the eye to the object and delivering the impression to the soul.

The Buddhists reject this analogy. There are sensations and there is a coordination or sārūpya
between sensation and its object. The fact of coordination can be seen as the source as well as the
result of our cognition.

19. Artha pratīti rūpatvāt.

It has the form of a distinct cognition. (p. 39)

When direct knowledge assumes the form of determinate knowledge it is called distinct
cognition. Right knowledge is efficient. Though cognition is caused by an object it is not passive.
It is only when the cognition spontaneously absorbs the object, the object is distinctly cognized.
There is a difference between this and an ordinary case of causation between seed and sprout.
Seed is the cause and sprout is the result, but cognition, which is the product, cognizes the object,
and this itself is the result. In this sense knowledge is efficient. The efficiency function of
knowledge is not separate from knowledge; it is the jñāpakatva of knowledge. Perceptual
knowledge is a distinct cognition of the object and at the same time it points to the presence of
the object in its ken. Therefore the result of cognizing is cognition itself.

THINK ABOUT IT: What is a flash of light? Flash only or a light only?

20. Artha sārūpyam asya pramāṇam.

Coordination between object and its image is the source of knowledge. (p.40)

Coordination or sūpya is the conformity between cognition and its object, eg, there is
coordination between my seeing blue and the patch of blue colour. Coordination is described as
the ākāra or form or aspect. Dreyfus notes that both Dignāga and Dharmakirti believe in
Sākāravāda according to which the cognizing consciousness does not apprehend the external
object directly and only apprehends it indirectly through the medium of aspects. An aspect is the
reflection of the object in the cognizing consciousness. It is not external to this consciousness. It
is the form under which an external object presents itself to the consciousness. It is also the form
that the cognizing consciousness assumes when it perceives an object, and thus it is a
representation of the object in the consciousness and also the consciousness that sees this
representation. This means that perception or direct knowledge is inherently reflexive.1

21. Tad vasād artha pratīti siddher iti.

Owing to this (coordination) the cognition of the object is produced. (p. 41)

Distinct cognition of the object is a self-conscious idea. Coordination causes distinctness.

Perceptual judgment is possible due to the coordination of the image with its object and its
contrast with correlative images. Sārūpya is described as anya-vyāvṛtti, or exclusion of the other.
For example, awareness of ‘this is blue’ and ‘this is not non-blue’ leads to a distinct cognition of
the object. It is the work of the intelligible intuition. Senses and object produce only an indefinite
sensation. Perceptual judgment is a result of the application of the laws of identity and
non-contradiction. Producing and obtaining of distinct cognition are not two things, but just one
thing.

Dharmakirti says that there is no difference between perception as a mental content and
perception as a mental act. Depending on the viewpoint it can be seen as either of the two.
Self-consciousness is not the property of a ‘mysterious’ soul, rather it is inherent in every
conscious act or image. However this is not to deny that the first moment of sensation causes the
second moment of construction. This causation is a flow of consecutive discrete moments or
kṣaṇa-santāna. There is no contradiction in saying that the same entity is a process of cognition

1
See George Dreyfus, pp. 335ff.
in away and the resulting content in a way. Coordination is the cause which makes our cognition
distinct. There is an act of awareness of similarity and a definite judgment_ ‘this is blue’.
Simultaneously there is a self-conscious distinct image of the blue which is the content. Pure
sensation calls forth a distinct image that is constructed. Our sensation, before being perceptual
judgment of the form ‘this is blue’ is asat kalppam eva or ‘imagined as asat or non-existent’, if
we want it to represent the self-conscious idea of the ‘blue’. Our cognition really begins to exist
as being self-conscious distinct image of ‘blue’ only when definitely shaped by the judgment
‘this is blue’. This coordination is immanent to the image. Pure sensation, according to
Dharmakirti, although it is also a necessary condition of all empirical knowledge, is a palpable
reality, its existence is established in the way of experiment in introspection. In
Pramāṇa-vārttikā, Dharmakirti gives this thought experiment2_ if we begin to stare at a patch of
colour and withdraw all our thoughts from everything else and reduce our consciousness to a
condition of extreme rigidity and become as though unconscious_ this is the condition of pure
sensation. If we, then, awakening from that state, begin to think, we remember having the image
of a patch of colour. We did not notice it in our foregoing state. It was pure sensation.

2
Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, vol. 1, p. 150.