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Collection: Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10
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0:03–0:33नाटक आद्बाषाक साहित्य, समालोचना, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कवित
0:33–0:39behind the world tested the mortar first what exactly is a valid piece of knowledge. What
0:39–0:46exactly does it mean for one thing to be invariably tied to another? He would not move an inch
0:46–0:51until the definition itself could survive every attack he could throw at it, including
0:51–0:57his own. He tells us plainly, in his own opening verses, who he built this fortress
0:57–1:03against the Buddhist logicians of his day, who denied an unseen maker of the world as
1:03–1:09confidently as they denied an unseen self. Tonight one of them has come to test the fortress
1:09–1:15in person. Watch how Gangesha answers him, not by shouting loud up but by defining more
1:15–1:21precisely than a new opponent thought possible, and then, more than once, precisely enough
1:21–1:25to catch his own first attempt in the same net.
1:25–1:30Exit. Act 1. The Inattentive Scholar.
1:30–1:38Geoletawon E45GESecuiter is seated, a lamp burning beside him. The MIMacron MAMacron
1:38–1:43Letawon E43Secuiter and the border are both present.
1:43–1:48Every author who begins a work performs in a vocation, wishing the work to be completed.
1:48–1:52I have done the same tonight. Before I ask anyone in this hall to accept a harder
1:52–1:57claim, let me test the easiest one first to does an invocation actually cause anything at all.
1:57–2:00A fair place to start and I will not let you pass it cheaply.
2:00–2:04If invocation causes completion the two should rise and fall together present when the work is
2:04–2:09finished absent when it fails. But I can name your scholar in this very tradition,
2:09–2:13Udayana himself, by report, in an inattentive hour, it completed the Kuran Evali without
2:13–2:17troubling to perform any invocation worth the name. There is your counter instance.
2:17–2:21The rule breaks in the very house that claims to have invented it.
2:21–2:27Keep that example close, friend. Because I intend to use it against you before this act is finished.
2:27–2:31Not merely answer it, but let me first grant you the full force of your objection.
2:31–2:37Honestly stated, if a cause and its effect are truly bound, the effect should never appear without it,
2:37–2:41nor the cause without eventually producing it. You, the Orner's work was completed.
2:41–2:47Is invocation on your account, was absent or careless on the surface? You have shown
2:47–2:51a deviation and deviation is fatal to any claim to causal law.
2:51–2:52Then you can see the point.
2:52–2:56I can see the appearance of the point, which is a different concession entirely.
2:56–3:02Consider what an invocation is actually said to produce, not the completion itself, directly,
3:02–3:06as though chanting a verse belayed bricks, but the removal of an obstacle that would
3:06–3:08otherwise have interrupted the work.
3:08–3:13A worldly task, once its obstacles are cleared, completes itself by worldly means skill
3:13–3:15materials, sustained effort.
3:15–3:20now ask of your inattentive scholar was his work. On that particular day, ever actually
3:20–3:25obstructed, if no obstacle stood in his path to begin with, there was nothing for an invocation
3:25–3:30to remove, and its absence proves nothing at all. A locksmith's absence does not deviate
3:30–3:35from the rule that locksmiths open locks on a day when no door happened to be locked.
3:35–3:40A convenient rescue. How would you ever know in advance whether an obstacle was lying
3:40–3:44in wait or not? You have made your causal law intestable. It now explains success
3:44–3:48and failure equally, which is another way of saying it explains nothing.
3:48–3:53Not intestable, only, like most causal claims worth having, tied to a condition rather than
3:53–3:55announced as unconditional.
3:55–4:01Fire causes smoke only where the fuel is wet enough to smolder dry fuel burns clean, and
4:01–4:05no one calls that a deviation in the law connecting fire and smoke.
4:05–4:09You are asking me to abandon a rule because it is a condition attached when every rule
4:09–4:14all either of us has ever relied on, from the kitchen to this hall, carries the same kind
4:14–4:15of condition.
4:15–4:21Then let me press you from my own side, Gengeshev, since the border, and I do not usually stand
4:21–4:22on the same ground.
4:22–4:28Grant, that invocation, removes obstacles rather than manufacturing completion directly.
4:28–4:33Still, how is that removal known, if not by the very Vedic injunction that first
4:33–4:38taught cultivated persons to perform it before an undertaking?
4:38–4:43a way scriptural authority and your causal chain has no first link.
4:43–4:46I will not strip it away. I never proposed to.
4:46–4:51Revelation tells us the general rule, ordinary observation of cultivated persons,
4:51–4:56generation after generation, performing this act before this kind of task,
4:56–5:00confirms that the rule is no idle poetry, whether to agree. As I do here,
5:00–5:05a cause may be trusted precisely as we trust any cause established by steady, repeated,
5:05–5:11unexplained by coincidence, correlation, the very method, border, that you yourself use every time
5:11–5:16you infer fire from smoke without demanding to see the fire directly. You have kept your promise
5:16–5:21a career. You did use my own example against me in the end. And I will keep making that same
5:21–5:27promise all evening. I never asked you to accept an unseen cause on faith. I ask only that you
5:27–5:32extend to my unseen causes the same courtesy of inference you already extend without a second
5:32–5:40thought to your own. Act 2. The Shell that was never silver. A servant places a shell on the
5:40–5:49low table beside the jar. G a letter 1e45ge executed gestures toward it. Before we build anything
5:49–5:55further we must agree what we mean by true cognition in the first place not what is true
5:55–5:59but what makes a cognition true as opposed to merely a current. Here is my first attempt at
5:59–6:05cognition is valid when it presents a property exactly where the property actually exists.
6:05–6:10I see silver and silver is there valid. I see silver in this shell and silver is not there invalid.
6:11–6:14That sounds almost too simple to need saying akara.
6:14–6:19Everything simple in this science has already survived an ambush or it would not be standing
6:19–6:23here simple in front of you. Watch the ambush now. Take the confused cognition.
6:24–6:29Common enough I dust the shell of silver. Test my definition against it. Honestly,
6:29–6:34the shell component of the cognition, the bare this, is placed correctly since the shell truly is
6:34–6:40there. The silver component is placed wrongly since no silver is there, one cognition, one sentence,
6:40–6:46and yet by my own definition is simultaneously valid in one half and invalid in the other.
6:46–6:49Is that not simply a contradiction in your definition?
6:49–6:54It would be if a cognition were forced to be valid or invalid as one indivisible lump,
6:54–6:58but a cognition of the shell silver is not one indivisible claim. It is two claims
6:58–7:04used by a single glance. One about this, one about silverness, and each half may be tested
7:04–7:08against the world separately, exactly as a sentence with two clauses may have one clause
7:08–7:14true and the other false without breaking the law of non-contradiction. My definition survives.
7:14–7:18Once we are honest about what a compound cognition actually contains.
7:19–7:22Then extend the test one step further and see whether it survives me.
7:22–7:26A tree stands before us, conjunction with a bird sits at its crown,
7:26–7:31an absence of the same conjunction sits at its root. By your definition, is the cognition this
7:31–7:37tree is conjunction valid or invalid? You have set the trap cleverly, and I will walk into it on
7:37–7:42purpose, because the way out is instructive, conjunction, and its absence do not occupy
7:42–7:47the whole tree indiscriminately. One occupies the crown, the other the route, and a cognition
7:47–7:52properly delimited by which part is being spoken of as neither vague nor self-contradicting,
7:52–7:59the tree. At its crown, S-conjunctioned is true the tree. At its route, Laxid is equally true.
7:59–8:04Only a cognition that refused to specify a part would deserve your accusation,
8:04–8:07and no careful speaker leaves a cognition so undressed.
8:07–8:11You are adding conditions to your definition faster than I can raise objections to it.
8:12–8:16At what point does a definition patch this many times stop being a definition and become a
8:16–8:20confession that the first attempt failed? When a physician adjusts a split twice before
8:20–8:23Before the bone set straight, we do not say the splint failed.
8:23–8:27We say the physician was honest about the first attempt and skilled enough to correct
8:27–8:30a before trusting a patient's full weight to it.
8:30–8:34I would rather hand you a definition with three patches, each of which has survived
8:34–8:39your best blow, than a single elegant sentence that shatters the moment you lean on it.
8:39–8:42Test it once more if you have another blow in you.
8:42–8:44One more then, and it is the sharpest I have.
8:44–8:48A pot freshly made was black before firing and is red after.
8:48–8:52This pot is black was once true and is now false, the very same sentence about the very
8:52–8:57same pot changing its truth, with nothing in your definition to explain why.
8:57–9:02Because my definition was never a claim about sentences floating free of time, it was from
9:02–9:03the start.
9:03–9:08A claim about a property residing in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it resides in
9:08–9:09a given part.
9:09–9:15The pot before firing was black remains true forever, unchanged by the kiln.
9:15–9:20This pot, now, is black was always a different clean, tied to a different moment, and it is
9:20–9:25no defect in a rule that it answers a time index question with a time indexed answer.
9:25–9:26The kill did not break my definition.
9:26–9:31It only proved that whoever forgets to specify, when was never speaking carefully enough, to
9:31–9:33test it in the first place.
9:33–9:36I begin to see why this book took a lifetime to write.
9:36–9:40It took a lifetime because every sentence in it is already set across from an opponent
9:40–9:44exactly as sharp as the one sitting across from me tonight.
9:44–9:46That is not a complaint, friend.
9:46–9:51That is the only kind of sentence worth building anything further upon.
9:51–9:54Act 3 The bond between smoke and fire.
9:54–9:59The lamp beside G a letter 1 E 4 5 G E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
9:59–10:00E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
10:00–10:01E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
10:01–10:02E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
10:02–10:08We are ready now for the engine of every inference either of us will ever make the bond called
10:08–10:14viati, the invariable tie between a mark such as smoke and what it proves such as fire without
10:14–10:19a precise account of that tie, smoke therefore fire is a habit, not a proof.
10:19–10:23Here is a first attempt of the tie holes when the mark never appears with a thing to
10:23–10:24be proven as absent.
10:24–10:29Simple and I think already broken, consider a purely affirmative claim with no counter
10:29–10:34instance available anywhere to test this is nameable because it is noble.
10:34–10:38Everything noble happens also to be nameable. There exists no case
10:38–10:42anywhere of noble but the nameable in which you're never occurs where absent could even be checked.
10:42–10:46Your definition asks me to search a field that has no far corner to search.
10:46–10:51You have found a genuine depth and I will not paper over it. I abandon the first attempt
10:51–10:56outright here in front of this hall exactly as readily as I abandoned my first definition
10:56–11:01of valid cognition and actidote. Let me try again the tie holds when the mark's own locus
11:01–11:04is never distinct from the locus of what it proves.
11:04–11:09No better, restate it in terms of smoke and fire occurring in different places, and the
11:09–11:15same gap reappears wherever no such different place can even be imagined to test it against.
11:15–11:19Correct again, and here is a third attempt, and a fourth, each closing adore the last
11:19–11:24one left open, until we reach the one I am prepared to defend against every blow
11:24–11:28you have already landed, and every one you have not yet thought to try the tithe is co-location
11:28–11:34itself, the mark residing together with what it proves in such a way that the mark's own presence
11:34–11:39is never found in a place determined, however, indirectly by the true and complete absence
11:39–11:46of what it proves. Test the mount now. Smoke rises from it. Fire. Somewhere on it is co-located
11:46–11:51with that very smoke. Nowhere is there an absence of firing general standing in the same place
11:51–11:57as the particular smoke, the tide holds, stated with no gap left for corner keys to hide in.
11:58–12:00You have built four definitions to survive one example.
12:00–12:02Forgive me if I am not yet dozzled.
12:03–12:05Bedazzled by the method, now to count.
12:05–12:08Notice what I did not do at any point in these four attempts.
12:08–12:12I did not simply assert my conclusion and dare you to disprove it.
12:12–12:15I built the weakest version of my own claim first, on purpose,
12:15–12:21and let you, or twice, let myself, break it before a stronger version was proposed.
12:21–12:26A wall tested four times by its own mason, and left standing is worth more than a wall
12:26–12:28no one has yet thought to push.
12:28–12:32But, Acarya, how do we ever come to know such a tie in the first place once it is properly
12:32–12:33defined?
12:33–12:35I have seen smoke and fire together in a kitchen.
12:35–12:37I have not seen every fire in the world."
12:37–12:43By repeated observation, joined to the failure of any single case however hard-sought to
12:43–12:48break the pattern, and, where repetition alone leaves a shadow of doubt, by further
12:48–12:52support your boost, friend himself half-rance without noticing his smoke could truly arise
12:52–12:58apart from fire, then smokes very dependence on fire. The fact that smoldering fuel, and only
12:58–13:04smoldering fuel, sends up that particular gray column would be an unexplained coincidence
13:04–13:10repeating itself in every kitchen, on every mountain, in every age, with no exception ever
13:10–13:15once observed by anyone, a coincidence that never fails is no longer usefully called a
13:15–13:23coincidence. It has earned a harder name a war. Act 4. An agent behind the clay. Gila
13:23–13:30Latawani 4 5g E-Esecutor lifts the jar from the table and sets it before the assembly.
13:30–13:35Every argument this evening has been sharpening a single tool. Now I put the tool to its hardest
13:35–13:42use. Earth and the other elements of this world are effects produced, arisen, not eternal,
13:42–13:46exactly as this juror is in effect. Nothing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, Earth
13:46–13:51and the other elements of a major precisely as this juror has a potter.
13:51–13:55Before I attack the arguments, Bodhi, I will attack its skeleton, and I promise you this
13:55–13:58is not evasion. It is the same discipline you demanded of me all evening.
13:58–14:02What precisely is the subject of this inference? You cannot simply say Earth and the other
14:02–14:07elements because no single word denotes each of them individually, and no single recurring
14:07–14:11feature unites them into one collective subject either.
14:11–14:15Bring me a subject precisely in your own idiom, or the inference has nowhere to stand before
14:15–14:16it has even begun.
14:16–14:22A demand I would have made of you had our positions been reversed, and I answer it in kind rather
14:22–14:24than waiting it aside.
14:24–14:28Let the subject be whatever is in effect, and is not already known by both of us to
14:28–14:33be produced by an embodied human agent that excludes the jar, which we both already
14:33–14:37agree was made by a potter, and it excludes nothing that remains genuinely indiscute
14:37–14:39between us.
14:39–14:44too narrow and dangerously so. On that phrasing, a sprout produced certainly yet by no embodied
14:44–14:49craftsman either falls inside your subject as readily as Earth does. Prove your conclusion
14:49–14:53for the sprout instead quietly, and you have proven something, but you have not proven the
14:53–14:57maker of worlds. You have only smuggled a small, unremarkable case into the same
14:57–15:01door and called it the same victory. A precise objection, and I will not answer
15:01–15:06it by softening the subject further, which is the tempting mistake. I will answer
15:06–15:11it by refusing to let the Sprout stand in for Earth at all. The Sprout was never the disputed
15:11–15:16topic between us tonight. Earth was, in inference, proves its conclusion, only for the subject
15:16–15:22actually named and its outset. And if I quietly substituted a Sprout partway through, I would
15:22–15:27have committed the very fault I spent an act ago accusing you of hiding inside a definition,
15:27–15:31changing the ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains,
15:31–15:38burrow, water, fire, air, taken. As the genuinely disputed effects they are, the sprout may weight
15:38–15:44its own eming. Then narrow it correctly yourself since you reject my narrowing. Say plainly,
15:44–15:48agency, here it means, being produced by someone possessing direct knowledge of the material
15:48–15:53cause desired to act an effort. The very three things a potter has standing before his wheel.
15:53–15:58I very nearly said exactly that a moment ago, and I am glad you forced me to test it before
15:58–16:04I leaned on it. Because it collapses under its own weight, yee-hoo, and I'd both already possess
16:04–16:09knowledge, desire, and effort concerning countless material causes every single day,
16:09–16:13and yet earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us of the strength of that ordinary
16:13–16:18knowledge and desire alone. If agency meant nothing more than the bare presence of those
16:18–16:23three faculties, in some person or other, the property would already be satisfied a thousand
16:23–16:28times over by ordinary living beings. In my inference, would prove nothing it did not
16:28–16:29already have to assume.
16:29–16:33Then you have refuted your own proof faster than I could have managed it myself tonight.
16:33–16:38I have refuted my own careless proof, which is a different achievement than refuting the
16:38–16:42proof itself, and it is exactly the achievement this entire evening has been training the
16:42–16:48Hall to recognize as progress, rather than defeat, what the argument actually requires
16:48–16:52is narrower still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely present
16:52–16:57alongside the production of her as mine happened to be present alongside the things
16:57–17:01I never caused, but are the effective cause of it, standing in the same causal relation
17:01–17:07to Earth that the Potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this drawer, and not merely
17:07–17:11keeping the same company as Earth's production the way an idle bicep interkeeps company with
17:11–17:13a fire he did not light.
17:13–17:17And can that narrower agency be found among us, a chorea, some embodied person, however
17:17–17:20hidden, who might satisfy it after all?
17:20–17:24Test it honestly and see where it leads an embodied agent's effort.
17:24–17:30a body, a body. On every account either of us accepts. Is itself among the produced things,
17:30–17:36requiring exactly this kind of maker? To explain earth by appeal to some earlier embodied agent
17:36–17:41is to borrow against a death that was never paid. Every candidate you offer me from within the
17:41–17:45world of bodies turns out to owe its own existence to the very kind of cause we are
17:45–17:50trying to locate. The chain cannot terminate in an embodied maker without either running back
17:50–17:56forever unexplained or stopping at last at a knower, a willer, and an actor whose effort
17:56–18:01does not itself depend on a body already owed to some further maker. That is the whole of what I
18:01–18:06mean by God and no more not a larger man, but the one linked in the chain of makers who does not
18:06–18:11himself require prior maker to be there at all. You have spent an entire evening refusing to
18:11–18:16let either of us take a shortcut not through my objections and twice tonight, not through your
18:16–18:21own first answers either. I do not yet call myself persuaded, but I no longer believe as I did when
18:21–18:26I sat down that this conclusion was reached by skipping a single step available to skip.
18:26–18:31That is the only outcome I have ever asked this hall for. I did not come here tonight to win an
18:31–18:36argument by speaking last. I came to build one sentence at a time in front of witnesses sharp
18:36–18:41enough to catch me if any single stone in the wall was set carelessly. If the wall stands,
18:41–18:46it will not be because I raised my voice at the end. It will be because nothing in it was
18:46–18:50was left and tested by the time the lamp burned down.
18:50–18:51Epilogue
18:51–18:55Saturdhara returns as the lamp is lowered.
18:55–18:57Notice what this evening was not.
18:57–19:03It was not louder than the debates that came before it in other halls, on other nights,
19:03–19:05over other books.
19:05–19:09Gangesha Upadileya's whole method was the opposite of volume, state the claim as
19:09–19:15weekly and precisely as Omnistila Laos, invite the sharpest blow available and if
19:15–19:21the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild rather than bluster past the wound. He called
19:21–19:27his book a wishful filling jewel and told us plainly in its own first lines whose darkness
19:27–19:33he meant it to clear. The powerful doubt of the Buddhist logicians of his age, who
19:33–19:39granted no unseen cause behind anything, neither an invocation's power nor a world's
19:39–19:44He did not answer that doubt by refusing to feel its weight.
19:44–19:51He answered it by insisting four times over in one evening alone, that his own first answer
19:51–19:55had not yet earned the right to stand unchallenged.
19:55–20:00Whether that is the same thing as being right, this all leaves, as it always does, to
20:00–20:03the one who carries the question out the door.
20:03–20:04Exhumed Omnis
20:04–20:05Thank you.
20:05–20:06Thank you.
20:06–20:07Thank you.
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20:08–20:09Thank you.
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20:13–20:14Thank you.
20:14–20:15Thank you.
20:15–20:16Thank you.
20:16–20:17Thank you.
20:17–20:18Thank you.
20:18–20:19Thank you.
20:19–20:20Thank you.
20:20–20:21Thank you.
20:21–20:22Thank you.
20:22–20:23Thank you.
20:23–20:24Thank you.
20:24–20:25Thank you.
20:25–20:26Thank you.
20:26–20:27Thank you.
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20:29–20:30Thank you.
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20:31–20:32Thank you.
20:32–20:33Thank you.

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नाटक आद्बाषाक साहित्य, समालोचना, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कविता, कवित behind the world tested the mortar first what exactly is a valid piece of knowledge. What exactly does it mean for one thing to be invariably tied to another? He would not move an inch until the definition itself could survive every attack he could throw at it, including his own. He tells us plainly, in his own opening verses, who he built this fortress against the Buddhist logicians of his day, who denied an unseen maker of the world as confidently as they denied an unseen self. Tonight one of them has come to test the fortress in person. Watch how Gangesha answers him, not by shouting loud up but by defining more precisely than a new opponent thought possible, and then, more than once, precisely enough to catch his own first attempt in the same net. Exit. Act 1. The Inattentive Scholar. Geoletawon E45GESecuiter is seated, a lamp burning beside him. The MIMacron MAMacron Letawon E43Secuiter and the border are both present. Every author who begins a work performs in a vocation, wishing the work to be completed. I have done the same tonight. Before I ask anyone in this hall to accept a harder claim, let me test the easiest one first to does an invocation actually cause anything at all. A fair place to start and I will not let you pass it cheaply. If invocation causes completion the two should rise and fall together present when the work is finished absent when it fails. But I can name your scholar in this very tradition, Udayana himself, by report, in an inattentive hour, it completed the Kuran Evali without troubling to perform any invocation worth the name. There is your counter instance. The rule breaks in the very house that claims to have invented it. Keep that example close, friend. Because I intend to use it against you before this act is finished. Not merely answer it, but let me first grant you the full force of your objection. Honestly stated, if a cause and its effect are truly bound, the effect should never appear without it, nor the cause without eventually producing it. You, the Orner's work was completed. Is invocation on your account, was absent or careless on the surface? You have shown a deviation and deviation is fatal to any claim to causal law. Then you can see the point. I can see the appearance of the point, which is a different concession entirely. Consider what an invocation is actually said to produce, not the completion itself, directly, as though chanting a verse belayed bricks, but the removal of an obstacle that would otherwise have interrupted the work. A worldly task, once its obstacles are cleared, completes itself by worldly means skill materials, sustained effort. now ask of your inattentive scholar was his work. On that particular day, ever actually obstructed, if no obstacle stood in his path to begin with, there was nothing for an invocation to remove, and its absence proves nothing at all. A locksmith's absence does not deviate from the rule that locksmiths open locks on a day when no door happened to be locked. A convenient rescue. How would you ever know in advance whether an obstacle was lying in wait or not? You have made your causal law intestable. It now explains success and failure equally, which is another way of saying it explains nothing. Not intestable, only, like most causal claims worth having, tied to a condition rather than announced as unconditional. Fire causes smoke only where the fuel is wet enough to smolder dry fuel burns clean, and no one calls that a deviation in the law connecting fire and smoke. You are asking me to abandon a rule because it is a condition attached when every rule all either of us has ever relied on, from the kitchen to this hall, carries the same kind of condition. Then let me press you from my own side, Gengeshev, since the border, and I do not usually stand on the same ground. Grant, that invocation, removes obstacles rather than manufacturing completion directly. Still, how is that removal known, if not by the very Vedic injunction that first taught cultivated persons to perform it before an undertaking? a way scriptural authority and your causal chain has no first link. I will not strip it away. I never proposed to. Revelation tells us the general rule, ordinary observation of cultivated persons, generation after generation, performing this act before this kind of task, confirms that the rule is no idle poetry, whether to agree. As I do here, a cause may be trusted precisely as we trust any cause established by steady, repeated, unexplained by coincidence, correlation, the very method, border, that you yourself use every time you infer fire from smoke without demanding to see the fire directly. You have kept your promise a career. You did use my own example against me in the end. And I will keep making that same promise all evening. I never asked you to accept an unseen cause on faith. I ask only that you extend to my unseen causes the same courtesy of inference you already extend without a second thought to your own. Act 2. The Shell that was never silver. A servant places a shell on the low table beside the jar. G a letter 1e45ge executed gestures toward it. Before we build anything further we must agree what we mean by true cognition in the first place not what is true but what makes a cognition true as opposed to merely a current. Here is my first attempt at cognition is valid when it presents a property exactly where the property actually exists. I see silver and silver is there valid. I see silver in this shell and silver is not there invalid. That sounds almost too simple to need saying akara. Everything simple in this science has already survived an ambush or it would not be standing here simple in front of you. Watch the ambush now. Take the confused cognition. Common enough I dust the shell of silver. Test my definition against it. Honestly, the shell component of the cognition, the bare this, is placed correctly since the shell truly is there. The silver component is placed wrongly since no silver is there, one cognition, one sentence, and yet by my own definition is simultaneously valid in one half and invalid in the other. Is that not simply a contradiction in your definition? It would be if a cognition were forced to be valid or invalid as one indivisible lump, but a cognition of the shell silver is not one indivisible claim. It is two claims used by a single glance. One about this, one about silverness, and each half may be tested against the world separately, exactly as a sentence with two clauses may have one clause true and the other false without breaking the law of non-contradiction. My definition survives. Once we are honest about what a compound cognition actually contains. Then extend the test one step further and see whether it survives me. A tree stands before us, conjunction with a bird sits at its crown, an absence of the same conjunction sits at its root. By your definition, is the cognition this tree is conjunction valid or invalid? You have set the trap cleverly, and I will walk into it on purpose, because the way out is instructive, conjunction, and its absence do not occupy the whole tree indiscriminately. One occupies the crown, the other the route, and a cognition properly delimited by which part is being spoken of as neither vague nor self-contradicting, the tree. At its crown, S-conjunctioned is true the tree. At its route, Laxid is equally true. Only a cognition that refused to specify a part would deserve your accusation, and no careful speaker leaves a cognition so undressed. You are adding conditions to your definition faster than I can raise objections to it. At what point does a definition patch this many times stop being a definition and become a confession that the first attempt failed? When a physician adjusts a split twice before Before the bone set straight, we do not say the splint failed. We say the physician was honest about the first attempt and skilled enough to correct a before trusting a patient's full weight to it. I would rather hand you a definition with three patches, each of which has survived your best blow, than a single elegant sentence that shatters the moment you lean on it. Test it once more if you have another blow in you. One more then, and it is the sharpest I have. A pot freshly made was black before firing and is red after. This pot is black was once true and is now false, the very same sentence about the very same pot changing its truth, with nothing in your definition to explain why. Because my definition was never a claim about sentences floating free of time, it was from the start. A claim about a property residing in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it resides in a given part. The pot before firing was black remains true forever, unchanged by the kiln. This pot, now, is black was always a different clean, tied to a different moment, and it is no defect in a rule that it answers a time index question with a time indexed answer. The kill did not break my definition. It only proved that whoever forgets to specify, when was never speaking carefully enough, to test it in the first place. I begin to see why this book took a lifetime to write. It took a lifetime because every sentence in it is already set across from an opponent exactly as sharp as the one sitting across from me tonight. That is not a complaint, friend. That is the only kind of sentence worth building anything further upon. Act 3 The bond between smoke and fire. The lamp beside G a letter 1 E 4 5 G E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E We are ready now for the engine of every inference either of us will ever make the bond called viati, the invariable tie between a mark such as smoke and what it proves such as fire without a precise account of that tie, smoke therefore fire is a habit, not a proof. Here is a first attempt of the tie holes when the mark never appears with a thing to be proven as absent. Simple and I think already broken, consider a purely affirmative claim with no counter instance available anywhere to test this is nameable because it is noble. Everything noble happens also to be nameable. There exists no case anywhere of noble but the nameable in which you're never occurs where absent could even be checked. Your definition asks me to search a field that has no far corner to search. You have found a genuine depth and I will not paper over it. I abandon the first attempt outright here in front of this hall exactly as readily as I abandoned my first definition of valid cognition and actidote. Let me try again the tie holds when the mark's own locus is never distinct from the locus of what it proves. No better, restate it in terms of smoke and fire occurring in different places, and the same gap reappears wherever no such different place can even be imagined to test it against. Correct again, and here is a third attempt, and a fourth, each closing adore the last one left open, until we reach the one I am prepared to defend against every blow you have already landed, and every one you have not yet thought to try the tithe is co-location itself, the mark residing together with what it proves in such a way that the mark's own presence is never found in a place determined, however, indirectly by the true and complete absence of what it proves. Test the mount now. Smoke rises from it. Fire. Somewhere on it is co-located with that very smoke. Nowhere is there an absence of firing general standing in the same place as the particular smoke, the tide holds, stated with no gap left for corner keys to hide in. You have built four definitions to survive one example. Forgive me if I am not yet dozzled. Bedazzled by the method, now to count. Notice what I did not do at any point in these four attempts. I did not simply assert my conclusion and dare you to disprove it. I built the weakest version of my own claim first, on purpose, and let you, or twice, let myself, break it before a stronger version was proposed. A wall tested four times by its own mason, and left standing is worth more than a wall no one has yet thought to push. But, Acarya, how do we ever come to know such a tie in the first place once it is properly defined? I have seen smoke and fire together in a kitchen. I have not seen every fire in the world." By repeated observation, joined to the failure of any single case however hard-sought to break the pattern, and, where repetition alone leaves a shadow of doubt, by further support your boost, friend himself half-rance without noticing his smoke could truly arise apart from fire, then smokes very dependence on fire. The fact that smoldering fuel, and only smoldering fuel, sends up that particular gray column would be an unexplained coincidence repeating itself in every kitchen, on every mountain, in every age, with no exception ever once observed by anyone, a coincidence that never fails is no longer usefully called a coincidence. It has earned a harder name a war. Act 4. An agent behind the clay. Gila Latawani 4 5g E-Esecutor lifts the jar from the table and sets it before the assembly. Every argument this evening has been sharpening a single tool. Now I put the tool to its hardest use. Earth and the other elements of this world are effects produced, arisen, not eternal, exactly as this juror is in effect. Nothing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, Earth and the other elements of a major precisely as this juror has a potter. Before I attack the arguments, Bodhi, I will attack its skeleton, and I promise you this is not evasion. It is the same discipline you demanded of me all evening. What precisely is the subject of this inference? You cannot simply say Earth and the other elements because no single word denotes each of them individually, and no single recurring feature unites them into one collective subject either. Bring me a subject precisely in your own idiom, or the inference has nowhere to stand before it has even begun. A demand I would have made of you had our positions been reversed, and I answer it in kind rather than waiting it aside. Let the subject be whatever is in effect, and is not already known by both of us to be produced by an embodied human agent that excludes the jar, which we both already agree was made by a potter, and it excludes nothing that remains genuinely indiscute between us. too narrow and dangerously so. On that phrasing, a sprout produced certainly yet by no embodied craftsman either falls inside your subject as readily as Earth does. Prove your conclusion for the sprout instead quietly, and you have proven something, but you have not proven the maker of worlds. You have only smuggled a small, unremarkable case into the same door and called it the same victory. A precise objection, and I will not answer it by softening the subject further, which is the tempting mistake. I will answer it by refusing to let the Sprout stand in for Earth at all. The Sprout was never the disputed topic between us tonight. Earth was, in inference, proves its conclusion, only for the subject actually named and its outset. And if I quietly substituted a Sprout partway through, I would have committed the very fault I spent an act ago accusing you of hiding inside a definition, changing the ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains, burrow, water, fire, air, taken. As the genuinely disputed effects they are, the sprout may weight its own eming. Then narrow it correctly yourself since you reject my narrowing. Say plainly, agency, here it means, being produced by someone possessing direct knowledge of the material cause desired to act an effort. The very three things a potter has standing before his wheel. I very nearly said exactly that a moment ago, and I am glad you forced me to test it before I leaned on it. Because it collapses under its own weight, yee-hoo, and I'd both already possess knowledge, desire, and effort concerning countless material causes every single day, and yet earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us of the strength of that ordinary knowledge and desire alone. If agency meant nothing more than the bare presence of those three faculties, in some person or other, the property would already be satisfied a thousand times over by ordinary living beings. In my inference, would prove nothing it did not already have to assume. Then you have refuted your own proof faster than I could have managed it myself tonight. I have refuted my own careless proof, which is a different achievement than refuting the proof itself, and it is exactly the achievement this entire evening has been training the Hall to recognize as progress, rather than defeat, what the argument actually requires is narrower still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely present alongside the production of her as mine happened to be present alongside the things I never caused, but are the effective cause of it, standing in the same causal relation to Earth that the Potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this drawer, and not merely keeping the same company as Earth's production the way an idle bicep interkeeps company with a fire he did not light. And can that narrower agency be found among us, a chorea, some embodied person, however hidden, who might satisfy it after all? Test it honestly and see where it leads an embodied agent's effort. a body, a body. On every account either of us accepts. Is itself among the produced things, requiring exactly this kind of maker? To explain earth by appeal to some earlier embodied agent is to borrow against a death that was never paid. Every candidate you offer me from within the world of bodies turns out to owe its own existence to the very kind of cause we are trying to locate. The chain cannot terminate in an embodied maker without either running back forever unexplained or stopping at last at a knower, a willer, and an actor whose effort does not itself depend on a body already owed to some further maker. That is the whole of what I mean by God and no more not a larger man, but the one linked in the chain of makers who does not himself require prior maker to be there at all. You have spent an entire evening refusing to let either of us take a shortcut not through my objections and twice tonight, not through your own first answers either. I do not yet call myself persuaded, but I no longer believe as I did when I sat down that this conclusion was reached by skipping a single step available to skip. That is the only outcome I have ever asked this hall for. I did not come here tonight to win an argument by speaking last. I came to build one sentence at a time in front of witnesses sharp enough to catch me if any single stone in the wall was set carelessly. If the wall stands, it will not be because I raised my voice at the end. It will be because nothing in it was was left and tested by the time the lamp burned down. Epilogue Saturdhara returns as the lamp is lowered. Notice what this evening was not. It was not louder than the debates that came before it in other halls, on other nights, over other books. Gangesha Upadileya's whole method was the opposite of volume, state the claim as weekly and precisely as Omnistila Laos, invite the sharpest blow available and if the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild rather than bluster past the wound. He called his book a wishful filling jewel and told us plainly in its own first lines whose darkness he meant it to clear. The powerful doubt of the Buddhist logicians of his age, who granted no unseen cause behind anything, neither an invocation's power nor a world's He did not answer that doubt by refusing to feel its weight. He answered it by insisting four times over in one evening alone, that his own first answer had not yet earned the right to stand unchallenged. Whether that is the same thing as being right, this all leaves, as it always does, to the one who carries the question out the door. Exhumed Omnis Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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