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Collection: Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10
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0:00–0:32अछि।
0:32–0:38them if you look a rope and a shell. In bad light, a man once mistook the rope for a snake
0:38–0:44and leapt back with his heart pounding, though no snake was ever there. Another, reaching
0:44–0:49for a coin, mistook a shell for a piece of silver, and his hand closed with pleasure
0:49–0:55on nothing. Every school in this hall agrees the man was wrong. What they cannot agree
0:55–1:00on is what happened when he was wrong where, if anywhere, the silver was while he was
1:00–1:06After seeing it, Vaikarspati misraspent a lifetime's commentary on this single hinge because he
1:06–1:11saw that the answer to what is a mistake and the answer to what is the world turn out on
1:11–1:18inspection to be the same question asked twice. Watch the shell, it will not leave the stage
1:18–1:22until the debate is finished with it. Exit.
1:22–1:28Act 1 The voice that says I. Vaikarspati is seated.
1:28–1:31The object to enters and bows.
1:31–1:36Before you come in Braumann to us as something worth inquiring into, a courier answer a plainer
1:36–1:37difficulty.
1:37–1:41Inquiry exists for what is doubtful or for what is useful to no one's doubt is settled,
1:41–1:43but no one doubts his own existence.
1:43–1:46The child, the sage, the beast in the field, every creature that has ever drawn breath
1:46–1:50knows itself as I instantly without proof, without a moment's hesitation.
1:50–1:53If the self is already the best known thing in the world, on what possible ground do
1:53–1:57you propose to inquire into it, as though it were hidden?
1:57–2:01have stated the objection better than most who bring it, and I will not blunt its edge, it
2:01–2:02is true.
2:02–2:07No one doubts a my, or a my not, but notice what you have proven and what you have not.
2:07–2:11You have proven that something answering to I is known beyond doubt, you have not proven
2:11–2:13that we know what that something is.
2:13–2:18A man may be certain a face is looking back at him in a dark room and be entirely wrong
2:18–2:20about whose face it is.
2:20–2:23Certainty of existence and knowledge of nature are two different achievements, and the
2:23–2:26entire quarrel of this act lies in the gap between them.
2:26–2:31Then show me the gap. What, in the plain experience of I, could possibly be mistaken?
2:32–2:37Consider what the word I is made to carry in ordinary speech. I am thin, I am going, I am blind,
2:37–2:43each ties thy to the body, if the body itself were the referent of I, a man who knew his boyhood body
2:43–2:49and his aged body, two bodies sharing not one hair, not one tooth, not one grain of skin in common
2:49–2:55across sixty years, could never say, with the confidence he does say it, I, who played in
2:55–3:01in my father's lap. Now hold my grandson in mine. Nothing continuous links those two bodies,
3:01–3:06except the eye that claims them both, and a thing that persists through what changes,
3:06–3:09hath not itself be the changing thing. No more than the thread running through a garland
3:09–3:13is one of the flowers strung upon it. A dreamer, then, might answer you that I have
3:13–3:17dreamed I wore a king's body, jeweled and tall and woken to find this same short
3:17–3:21ordinary frame. If the dream self is a different self from the waking one, your thread has
3:21–3:22already snapped.
3:22–3:27On the contrary, you have handed me my own example before I could reach for it.
3:27–3:30The Dreamer wakes and says, I am not a king.
3:30–3:35I am a man, the kingly body is what gets cancelled by waking, while the sense of I that owned
3:35–3:38both the dream and the waking equally is cancelled by nothing at all.
3:38–3:42A man who by yogic power takes on a tiger's form does not.
3:42–3:46In that form, cease to experience himself as the same one who was a man a moment
3:46–3:47before.
3:47–3:50Body after body is put on and shed like a traveller is changing coats.
3:50–3:54The traveler is not thereby proven to be one of the coats.
3:54–3:57Then let the senses be the substratum of eye, if not the body, for surely the eye that saw
3:57–3:59is not the hand that now touches.
3:59–4:03And yet I say, without a flicker of doubt, what I saw.
4:03–4:04I now touch.
4:04–4:09One abridging two different instruments, exactly as one abridged two different bodies a moment
4:09–4:10ago.
4:10–4:12The senses are instruments of the knower.
4:12–4:16They cannot also be the knower they serve, any more than the axe can be the woodsman
4:16–4:18who swings it.
4:18–4:23all this. I still do not see what remains to be inquired into. You have only relocated
4:23–4:28I from body to something behind the body, call it consciousness, and be done.
4:28–4:33Here is the second half of your original objection. And it is the sharper half, you are right that
4:33–4:38it existed, and I saved it for its proper place. Inquiry is pointless where knowledge
4:38–4:43serves no purpose, but consider the experience of I that every creature has as an experience
4:43–4:49of a limited thing. I am in this room. I am small. I suffer this grief and not that one.
4:49–4:54The scriptures which speak of the self, a secure Trudy, a Samariti, the old epics,
4:54–5:00describes something that shares none of those limits, infinite, undivided, a single and broken
5:00–5:04mass of consciousness and bliss. Either the everyday I and the self of the scriptures are
5:04–5:09the same reality wrongly seen, or they are simply two different things and the scriptures
5:09–5:14are lying. If they are the same reality, wrongly seen, then everything turns on the single word
5:14–5:20wrongly, and until we understand what wrongness itself is, we cannot know whether scripture
5:20–5:24or everyday experience has the truer claim on us. That is not a settled question, that
5:24–5:29is the whole of what remains to inquire into. Then the entire edifice you are building
5:29–5:34rests on knowing what an error is. It does, which is why I will not move one step further
5:34–5:39toward Brahman until that question has been fought to its floor, here, in this hall, by
5:39–5:42every school willing to defend an account of it.
5:42–5:46Bring your strongest opponents, by would rather lose this argument honestly than win it by
5:46–5:50leaving the hardest part for later.
5:50–5:51Act 2.
5:51–5:53The Shell in the Half-Light.
5:53–5:58The lamp by the door is trimmed brighter, the shell still lying where the servant
5:58–6:03set it is now visible to the hall, the Naeik allegation rises.
6:03–6:06Once you have thrown the floor open, Akaria, let me close it quickly.
6:06–6:10A man sees that shell and poor light and cries silver.
6:10–6:14What has happened is not mysterious, silver is a real thing existing somewhere in the
6:14–6:15world.
6:15–6:19An emergent shop, in a coin in his own memory and his cognition has simply misapplied that
6:19–6:23real silver to this location, mistaking one existing thing for another existing thing
6:23–6:25standing in its place.
6:25–6:27Nothing indefinable is required.
6:27–6:31Error is simply any athekaiati, a real object, wrongly placed.
6:31–6:33A tidy answer, the Gician.
6:33–6:36And I will treat it exactly as tidally as it deserves.
6:36–6:38Tell me first, on your account.
6:38–6:41Does his cognition apprehend the shell at all?
6:41–6:45Only confusingly, its thisness is grasped, but its shell nature is missed, owing to
6:45–6:47some defect in the eye or the light.
6:47–6:53And the silver he sees so vividly, where, at that moment, does it actually exist?
6:53–6:57In the market, elsewhere, real as ever, his cognition merely reaches a cross-distance
6:57–7:00and applies it here, through the defect.
7:00–7:05All, what extraordinary good fortune poor cognition possesses, that it can reach all the way to the
7:05–7:10merchant's shop and drag a piece of silver bodily into this man's hand, and yet still be called
7:10–7:15nothing more than an ordinary case of getting a location wrong. Consider what your own school
7:15–7:20teaches elsewhere. A cause can only be blocked from producing its proper effect by a defect.
7:20–7:25A defect cannot manufacture in it the power to produce some other effect entirely far into its
7:25–7:30nature. A parched, fire-scorched, sugarcane seed does not. Missing its proper power,
7:30–7:35sprout a banana stalk instead, yet you ask me to believe that a defective eye,
7:35–7:40blocked from its proper task of showing a man a shell, somehow acquires the entirely different
7:40–7:44power of hauling real silver across a city and setting it down in his palm. That is not a small
7:44–7:48defect, that is a miracle wearing the modest clothing of an error.
7:48–7:52Then say only that the form of remembered silver arises and is misapplied here,
7:52–7:54not the silver itself traveling bodily.
7:54–7:58then you have already abandoned one real thing cognized as another,
7:58–8:03which was your whole doctrine, and slid halfway into my own house without paying rent.
8:03–8:07If it is a mere form, arising from memory and misapplied, tell me plainly.
8:07–8:14Is that form silver, or is it not? If it is truly silver, my earlier question returns in full force.
8:14–8:18Silver cannot intelligibly be here, an object which is not silver,
8:18–8:22without the very contradiction you set out to avoid, if it is not truly silver,
8:22–8:27then you have quietly granted me everything, for that is exactly what I mean by any abaconea,
8:27–8:33indefinable, neither simply real nor simply unreal, and you have arrived at my conclusion by
8:33–8:36the scenic route, complaining about the view the entire way."
8:37–8:41The assembly, a low ripple of laughter, quickly suppressed.
8:41–8:46I have answered this objection at length elsewhere in the Nyaknika and will not
8:46–8:49rehearse the whole of it standing here in the evening cold.
8:49–8:58Nor need you, you have conceded the essential point, and a debater, who yields the centre of a citadel need not also surrender the outer wall before witnesses.
8:58–9:03Sit, friend, you have argued honestly, which is worth more in this hall than winning.
9:04–9:17Act 3. The Vanishing Difference. The Prabhikara M. I. Macron M. A. Macron letter 1 E. 4 3 S. I. K. a steps forward, more cautious than the logician who preceded him.
9:17–9:22I watched my colleague Silver dragged across the city, and I will not repeat his error,
9:22–9:28I posit nothing so extravagant, what actually occurs when the shell is mistaken.
9:28–9:30Is this two cognitions arise together?
9:30–9:37A bare perception of this, here and now, and a memory of Silver, seen long ago, awakened
9:37–9:42by the shell's faint gleam, the defect lies only in this the man fails to notice that
9:42–9:46one of these is a present perception, and the other a mere memory, he runs the two
9:46–9:51together, unmarked, and speaks as though he perceived one single thing, there is no third,
9:51–9:57indefinable entity anywhere in this story, only ordinary perception, ordinary memory,
9:57–10:03and an ordinary failure to keep them apart. Call it Akiati not a false cognition at all,
10:03–10:07only a missing cognition, the missing awareness of a distinction."
10:07–10:12A far more careful doctrine than the last, and I will grant at the complement of a
10:12–10:17a hard question rather than a quick one. Tell me, on your account is the perception this,
10:17–10:25bear, present, immediate, in any way false. Not in the least. It is simple and entire accurate.
10:25–10:31Suffer as it bows. And the memory of silver, is it in itself, false? No more than any memory
10:31–10:38is false. It correctly recalls silver once seen. The fault lies only in a blending,
10:38–10:42in either ingredient. Then hear the difficulty this creates for you,
10:42–10:48and it is fatal. Not merely inconvenient, the whole world, without exception, describes this
10:48–10:55experience in a single sentence. This is silver, not this, and, separately, I recall silver,
10:55–11:01a plain, unified, first-person claim of identity, spoken with exactly the same confident grammar
11:01–11:05as this is a pot, if what truly occurred were too accurate cognitions standing innocently
11:05–11:12side by side, merely unlabeled, whence comes the positive, mistaken assertion of oneness between
11:12–11:17them. Two true things standing near each other, even if their nearness goes unnoticed, do not
11:17–11:21thereby generate a false claim that they are identical. You have accounted for a failure to
11:21–11:25distinguish, you have not accounted for the man's eager reach toward the ground to pick the
11:25–11:31silver up, missing a difference is a kind of blindness. Reaching for a coin that is not
11:31–11:36not there is a kind of belief and your doctrine, for all its carefulness, gives me the blindness
11:36–11:39and quietly loses the belief along the way.
11:39–11:44The blending itself might be called the error, without positing any third entity beyond the
11:44–11:46two cognitions blended.
11:46–11:49Then the blending is either itself a cognition.
11:49–11:51In which case, of what object?
11:51–11:56If not of some thing answering to silver here, which is precisely the indefinable object
11:56–11:59I am arguing for and you are trying to argue around, where the blending is not a
11:59–12:05cognition at all, in which case it cannot explain a man's hand moving eagerly toward the ground,
12:05–12:10for hands to not move at the prompting of what is not known. You have built a very fine wall
12:10–12:13around the shell, friend, and left the door open on both sides.
12:15–12:23Act 4 Neither real nor unreal. Beikas Bharti rises and comes down from the teacher's seat,
12:23–12:29level with the assembly. Two schools have tried, honestly, to explain the shell without paying
12:29–12:34the price I ask, and both have quietly paid it after all. In smaller coin, let me now say plainly
12:34–12:38what I think happened when that man reached for silver that was not there, and let the
12:38–12:44hall test it as harshly as it tested the rest. The silver he saw was not real, for if it were,
12:44–12:50his cognition would rightly take the form shallower, at furthest reach, silver, back in the market,
12:50–12:56never silver here. No true thing can be. At one and the same time, itself and located where
12:56–13:07where it demonstrably is not, nor was the silver simply unreal, nothing whatsoever, on the same footing as a hare's horn or the son of a barren woman, for the utterly non-existent never enters experience at all.
13:07–13:14No one, not once in the history of the world, has reached eagerly toward a hare's horn believing he saw one gleaming on the ground.
13:14–13:18Whatever gleamed at him was something sufficient to move his hand.
13:18–13:25Then say it was both real and unreal at once and be done with the paradox honestly instead of inventing a third word to hide inside.
13:25–13:26I cannot.
13:26–13:30And here is why, stated as plainly as I can manage.
13:30–13:34Real and unreal are not two shades on a single scale that a thing might mix, like gray mixing
13:34–13:40black and white, their direct contradictory's, exhaustive of the field between them, to affirm
13:40–13:42one is already, in the same breath.
13:42–13:47To deny the other, a single thing cannot be not once affirmed, and denied under the
13:47–13:51very same respect without the sentence collapsing into noise, so the silver was
13:51–13:53neither wholly real.
13:53–14:00holy unreal nor a coherent mixture of both. It was any of Iconea, indefinable in terms of that very
14:00–14:05distinction, appearing with all the vividness of the real, resting on nothing that could sustain
14:05–14:08it as real, and vanishing the instant a steadier light corrected it.
14:08–14:13A pleasing formula for a coin that was never really missing from anyone's purse.
14:13–14:17But why should I trust it as a key to anything larger than a merchant's shelf?
14:17–14:22Because the very sane three-part test applies, without needing to be altered by so much as
14:22–14:27a word to the whole of the world you are standing in as you ask me that question, consider the mirage.
14:27–14:33A traveler crossing hot sand sees water shimmering ahead. Not memory alone, for it is seen now,
14:33–14:39before him. Not simple truth. For a thirsty man who rant warded it and tried to drink would find
14:39–14:44sand in his mouth and nothing else, the water is there. Doing exactly what the silver did.
14:44–14:50Vivid, located, ungraspable, indefiable, now extend the same reasoning one step further.
14:50–14:55and you reach the very argument this whole bouquet. This whole inquiry was built to carry you toward
14:55–15:01the body you call yours, the senses through which you argue with me, this whole, this lamp,
15:01–15:07this evening itself. All of it is new, arising and changing before our eyes. The way the Mirage
15:07–15:12Water was new the instant the light struck the sand just so, and all of it is superimposed,
15:12–15:17exactly as the Mirage Water and the Shell Silver were superimposed. Upon a substratum that
15:17–15:23that does not itself change, the single, conscious self that was present, unaltered, to the seeing
15:23–15:26of your boyhood body and the seeing of the body you wear tonight.
15:26–15:31The whole visible, tangible, arguable world stands to the self exactly as the silver
15:31–15:36stood to the shell, neither ultimately real, since a steadier vision dissolves it without
15:36–15:42a trace, nor simply un-real, since here we both are using it to argue.
15:42–15:45Then when the merchant corrects the fool at the market and the fool's eyes clear
15:45–15:50the shell is merely a shell again, you are telling me that is a small ordinary rehearsal of the one
15:50–15:55correction, all of us sooner or later must undergo. That is exactly what I am telling you,
15:55–16:00the whole of this science, the whole of the Bammati, if you will let an old commentator name
16:00–16:05his own book and his own hall, is nothing more than the slow, patient trimming of the lamp,
16:05–16:10so that when we finally do look down at what we have been calling silver our whole lives,
16:10–16:16we see, without flinching and without loss. That it was a shell, and, being a shell and nothing
16:16–16:20more, was never in the first place a thing our happiness ever actually depended on.
16:21–16:27A long stillness, the prapaka and the naeika exchange a glance but do not speak.
16:29–16:35Epilogue. Sathridhara returns and picks up the shell from beside the door, turning it once in
16:35–16:41the lamplight before setting it down again. No one in this hall tonight argued that the
16:41–16:47man was right to reach for silver. The argument was only ever about where the silver was while
16:47–16:53he was wrong, and that argument, once you have followed it all the way to its end, turns
16:53–16:58out to have been asking the largest question philosophy knows how to ask, wearing the
16:58–17:00smallest possible disguise.
17:00–17:04Vaikar-sparti misra did not invent the shell.
17:04–17:09Every tradition represented in this hall inherited it from the same old example.
17:09–17:15Warned smooth by centuries of hands turning it over exactly as I have just turned it over
17:15–17:16now.
17:16–17:21What he did was refuse to let anyone leave the hall until they had said plainly what
17:21–17:25they thought had happened in the half-second before the mistake was caught.
17:25–17:31If you go home tonight turning the same question over in your own hands, the play has done
17:31–17:35what the commentary that inspired it was written to do.
17:35–17:42Exhumed Omnis, the lamp is carried out last and the shell is left as it was found beside
17:42–17:42the door.

Plain text

अछि। them if you look a rope and a shell. In bad light, a man once mistook the rope for a snake and leapt back with his heart pounding, though no snake was ever there. Another, reaching for a coin, mistook a shell for a piece of silver, and his hand closed with pleasure on nothing. Every school in this hall agrees the man was wrong. What they cannot agree on is what happened when he was wrong where, if anywhere, the silver was while he was After seeing it, Vaikarspati misraspent a lifetime's commentary on this single hinge because he saw that the answer to what is a mistake and the answer to what is the world turn out on inspection to be the same question asked twice. Watch the shell, it will not leave the stage until the debate is finished with it. Exit. Act 1 The voice that says I. Vaikarspati is seated. The object to enters and bows. Before you come in Braumann to us as something worth inquiring into, a courier answer a plainer difficulty. Inquiry exists for what is doubtful or for what is useful to no one's doubt is settled, but no one doubts his own existence. The child, the sage, the beast in the field, every creature that has ever drawn breath knows itself as I instantly without proof, without a moment's hesitation. If the self is already the best known thing in the world, on what possible ground do you propose to inquire into it, as though it were hidden? have stated the objection better than most who bring it, and I will not blunt its edge, it is true. No one doubts a my, or a my not, but notice what you have proven and what you have not. You have proven that something answering to I is known beyond doubt, you have not proven that we know what that something is. A man may be certain a face is looking back at him in a dark room and be entirely wrong about whose face it is. Certainty of existence and knowledge of nature are two different achievements, and the entire quarrel of this act lies in the gap between them. Then show me the gap. What, in the plain experience of I, could possibly be mistaken? Consider what the word I is made to carry in ordinary speech. I am thin, I am going, I am blind, each ties thy to the body, if the body itself were the referent of I, a man who knew his boyhood body and his aged body, two bodies sharing not one hair, not one tooth, not one grain of skin in common across sixty years, could never say, with the confidence he does say it, I, who played in in my father's lap. Now hold my grandson in mine. Nothing continuous links those two bodies, except the eye that claims them both, and a thing that persists through what changes, hath not itself be the changing thing. No more than the thread running through a garland is one of the flowers strung upon it. A dreamer, then, might answer you that I have dreamed I wore a king's body, jeweled and tall and woken to find this same short ordinary frame. If the dream self is a different self from the waking one, your thread has already snapped. On the contrary, you have handed me my own example before I could reach for it. The Dreamer wakes and says, I am not a king. I am a man, the kingly body is what gets cancelled by waking, while the sense of I that owned both the dream and the waking equally is cancelled by nothing at all. A man who by yogic power takes on a tiger's form does not. In that form, cease to experience himself as the same one who was a man a moment before. Body after body is put on and shed like a traveller is changing coats. The traveler is not thereby proven to be one of the coats. Then let the senses be the substratum of eye, if not the body, for surely the eye that saw is not the hand that now touches. And yet I say, without a flicker of doubt, what I saw. I now touch. One abridging two different instruments, exactly as one abridged two different bodies a moment ago. The senses are instruments of the knower. They cannot also be the knower they serve, any more than the axe can be the woodsman who swings it. all this. I still do not see what remains to be inquired into. You have only relocated I from body to something behind the body, call it consciousness, and be done. Here is the second half of your original objection. And it is the sharper half, you are right that it existed, and I saved it for its proper place. Inquiry is pointless where knowledge serves no purpose, but consider the experience of I that every creature has as an experience of a limited thing. I am in this room. I am small. I suffer this grief and not that one. The scriptures which speak of the self, a secure Trudy, a Samariti, the old epics, describes something that shares none of those limits, infinite, undivided, a single and broken mass of consciousness and bliss. Either the everyday I and the self of the scriptures are the same reality wrongly seen, or they are simply two different things and the scriptures are lying. If they are the same reality, wrongly seen, then everything turns on the single word wrongly, and until we understand what wrongness itself is, we cannot know whether scripture or everyday experience has the truer claim on us. That is not a settled question, that is the whole of what remains to inquire into. Then the entire edifice you are building rests on knowing what an error is. It does, which is why I will not move one step further toward Brahman until that question has been fought to its floor, here, in this hall, by every school willing to defend an account of it. Bring your strongest opponents, by would rather lose this argument honestly than win it by leaving the hardest part for later. Act 2. The Shell in the Half-Light. The lamp by the door is trimmed brighter, the shell still lying where the servant set it is now visible to the hall, the Naeik allegation rises. Once you have thrown the floor open, Akaria, let me close it quickly. A man sees that shell and poor light and cries silver. What has happened is not mysterious, silver is a real thing existing somewhere in the world. An emergent shop, in a coin in his own memory and his cognition has simply misapplied that real silver to this location, mistaking one existing thing for another existing thing standing in its place. Nothing indefinable is required. Error is simply any athekaiati, a real object, wrongly placed. A tidy answer, the Gician. And I will treat it exactly as tidally as it deserves. Tell me first, on your account. Does his cognition apprehend the shell at all? Only confusingly, its thisness is grasped, but its shell nature is missed, owing to some defect in the eye or the light. And the silver he sees so vividly, where, at that moment, does it actually exist? In the market, elsewhere, real as ever, his cognition merely reaches a cross-distance and applies it here, through the defect. All, what extraordinary good fortune poor cognition possesses, that it can reach all the way to the merchant's shop and drag a piece of silver bodily into this man's hand, and yet still be called nothing more than an ordinary case of getting a location wrong. Consider what your own school teaches elsewhere. A cause can only be blocked from producing its proper effect by a defect. A defect cannot manufacture in it the power to produce some other effect entirely far into its nature. A parched, fire-scorched, sugarcane seed does not. Missing its proper power, sprout a banana stalk instead, yet you ask me to believe that a defective eye, blocked from its proper task of showing a man a shell, somehow acquires the entirely different power of hauling real silver across a city and setting it down in his palm. That is not a small defect, that is a miracle wearing the modest clothing of an error. Then say only that the form of remembered silver arises and is misapplied here, not the silver itself traveling bodily. then you have already abandoned one real thing cognized as another, which was your whole doctrine, and slid halfway into my own house without paying rent. If it is a mere form, arising from memory and misapplied, tell me plainly. Is that form silver, or is it not? If it is truly silver, my earlier question returns in full force. Silver cannot intelligibly be here, an object which is not silver, without the very contradiction you set out to avoid, if it is not truly silver, then you have quietly granted me everything, for that is exactly what I mean by any abaconea, indefinable, neither simply real nor simply unreal, and you have arrived at my conclusion by the scenic route, complaining about the view the entire way." The assembly, a low ripple of laughter, quickly suppressed. I have answered this objection at length elsewhere in the Nyaknika and will not rehearse the whole of it standing here in the evening cold. Nor need you, you have conceded the essential point, and a debater, who yields the centre of a citadel need not also surrender the outer wall before witnesses. Sit, friend, you have argued honestly, which is worth more in this hall than winning. Act 3. The Vanishing Difference. The Prabhikara M. I. Macron M. A. Macron letter 1 E. 4 3 S. I. K. a steps forward, more cautious than the logician who preceded him. I watched my colleague Silver dragged across the city, and I will not repeat his error, I posit nothing so extravagant, what actually occurs when the shell is mistaken. Is this two cognitions arise together? A bare perception of this, here and now, and a memory of Silver, seen long ago, awakened by the shell's faint gleam, the defect lies only in this the man fails to notice that one of these is a present perception, and the other a mere memory, he runs the two together, unmarked, and speaks as though he perceived one single thing, there is no third, indefinable entity anywhere in this story, only ordinary perception, ordinary memory, and an ordinary failure to keep them apart. Call it Akiati not a false cognition at all, only a missing cognition, the missing awareness of a distinction." A far more careful doctrine than the last, and I will grant at the complement of a a hard question rather than a quick one. Tell me, on your account is the perception this, bear, present, immediate, in any way false. Not in the least. It is simple and entire accurate. Suffer as it bows. And the memory of silver, is it in itself, false? No more than any memory is false. It correctly recalls silver once seen. The fault lies only in a blending, in either ingredient. Then hear the difficulty this creates for you, and it is fatal. Not merely inconvenient, the whole world, without exception, describes this experience in a single sentence. This is silver, not this, and, separately, I recall silver, a plain, unified, first-person claim of identity, spoken with exactly the same confident grammar as this is a pot, if what truly occurred were too accurate cognitions standing innocently side by side, merely unlabeled, whence comes the positive, mistaken assertion of oneness between them. Two true things standing near each other, even if their nearness goes unnoticed, do not thereby generate a false claim that they are identical. You have accounted for a failure to distinguish, you have not accounted for the man's eager reach toward the ground to pick the silver up, missing a difference is a kind of blindness. Reaching for a coin that is not not there is a kind of belief and your doctrine, for all its carefulness, gives me the blindness and quietly loses the belief along the way. The blending itself might be called the error, without positing any third entity beyond the two cognitions blended. Then the blending is either itself a cognition. In which case, of what object? If not of some thing answering to silver here, which is precisely the indefinable object I am arguing for and you are trying to argue around, where the blending is not a cognition at all, in which case it cannot explain a man's hand moving eagerly toward the ground, for hands to not move at the prompting of what is not known. You have built a very fine wall around the shell, friend, and left the door open on both sides. Act 4 Neither real nor unreal. Beikas Bharti rises and comes down from the teacher's seat, level with the assembly. Two schools have tried, honestly, to explain the shell without paying the price I ask, and both have quietly paid it after all. In smaller coin, let me now say plainly what I think happened when that man reached for silver that was not there, and let the hall test it as harshly as it tested the rest. The silver he saw was not real, for if it were, his cognition would rightly take the form shallower, at furthest reach, silver, back in the market, never silver here. No true thing can be. At one and the same time, itself and located where where it demonstrably is not, nor was the silver simply unreal, nothing whatsoever, on the same footing as a hare's horn or the son of a barren woman, for the utterly non-existent never enters experience at all. No one, not once in the history of the world, has reached eagerly toward a hare's horn believing he saw one gleaming on the ground. Whatever gleamed at him was something sufficient to move his hand. Then say it was both real and unreal at once and be done with the paradox honestly instead of inventing a third word to hide inside. I cannot. And here is why, stated as plainly as I can manage. Real and unreal are not two shades on a single scale that a thing might mix, like gray mixing black and white, their direct contradictory's, exhaustive of the field between them, to affirm one is already, in the same breath. To deny the other, a single thing cannot be not once affirmed, and denied under the very same respect without the sentence collapsing into noise, so the silver was neither wholly real. holy unreal nor a coherent mixture of both. It was any of Iconea, indefinable in terms of that very distinction, appearing with all the vividness of the real, resting on nothing that could sustain it as real, and vanishing the instant a steadier light corrected it. A pleasing formula for a coin that was never really missing from anyone's purse. But why should I trust it as a key to anything larger than a merchant's shelf? Because the very sane three-part test applies, without needing to be altered by so much as a word to the whole of the world you are standing in as you ask me that question, consider the mirage. A traveler crossing hot sand sees water shimmering ahead. Not memory alone, for it is seen now, before him. Not simple truth. For a thirsty man who rant warded it and tried to drink would find sand in his mouth and nothing else, the water is there. Doing exactly what the silver did. Vivid, located, ungraspable, indefiable, now extend the same reasoning one step further. and you reach the very argument this whole bouquet. This whole inquiry was built to carry you toward the body you call yours, the senses through which you argue with me, this whole, this lamp, this evening itself. All of it is new, arising and changing before our eyes. The way the Mirage Water was new the instant the light struck the sand just so, and all of it is superimposed, exactly as the Mirage Water and the Shell Silver were superimposed. Upon a substratum that that does not itself change, the single, conscious self that was present, unaltered, to the seeing of your boyhood body and the seeing of the body you wear tonight. The whole visible, tangible, arguable world stands to the self exactly as the silver stood to the shell, neither ultimately real, since a steadier vision dissolves it without a trace, nor simply un-real, since here we both are using it to argue. Then when the merchant corrects the fool at the market and the fool's eyes clear the shell is merely a shell again, you are telling me that is a small ordinary rehearsal of the one correction, all of us sooner or later must undergo. That is exactly what I am telling you, the whole of this science, the whole of the Bammati, if you will let an old commentator name his own book and his own hall, is nothing more than the slow, patient trimming of the lamp, so that when we finally do look down at what we have been calling silver our whole lives, we see, without flinching and without loss. That it was a shell, and, being a shell and nothing more, was never in the first place a thing our happiness ever actually depended on. A long stillness, the prapaka and the naeika exchange a glance but do not speak. Epilogue. Sathridhara returns and picks up the shell from beside the door, turning it once in the lamplight before setting it down again. No one in this hall tonight argued that the man was right to reach for silver. The argument was only ever about where the silver was while he was wrong, and that argument, once you have followed it all the way to its end, turns out to have been asking the largest question philosophy knows how to ask, wearing the smallest possible disguise. Vaikar-sparti misra did not invent the shell. Every tradition represented in this hall inherited it from the same old example. Warned smooth by centuries of hands turning it over exactly as I have just turned it over now. What he did was refuse to let anyone leave the hall until they had said plainly what they thought had happened in the half-second before the mistake was caught. If you go home tonight turning the same question over in your own hands, the play has done what the commentary that inspired it was written to do. Exhumed Omnis, the lamp is carried out last and the shell is left as it was found beside the door.

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