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Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10

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en (0.994501)

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1:09:29

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1. 0:03–0:15Setting an assembler hall sabah in Mithila, open-pillared, a lamp burning. Scholars of many schools have gathered, as was the custom, to test one proposition against all comers.
2. 0:15–0:23Act 1. The First Bukke of Flowers. Of arguments concerning the cause of the world.
3. 0:23–0:29Scene 1 Invocation Stage curtain rises on the Lamplit Sabah.
4. 0:29–0:36Udayana stands, folds his hands toward an unseen image, and speaks first not to the assembly
5. 0:36–0:42but as an offering dot-b-slash. Before argument and offering understand these words in two
6. 0:42–0:49senses at once, as one speaks of flowers and in the same breath of doctrine.
7. 0:49–0:57Udayana as in vocation half-jump, a beat then more plainly to the hall, definition of the
8. 0:57–0:59subject of inquiry.
9. 0:59–1:04I mean then to make plain the nature of that lord that transcend itself, thus worship the
10. 1:04–1:07learned caller rode to heaven and to freedom.
11. 1:07–1:09Seen to, why inquire at all?
12. 1:09–1:14The assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement dot bishlash.
13. 1:14–1:15Udayana, why inquire?
14. 1:15–1:17The Vedda already sings of him.
15. 1:17–1:22tradition in this hall already has its god under a different name. What doubt remains to open an
16. 1:22–1:28inquiry? None, and that is exactly my point friend, and exactly my problem. Look at this assembly.
17. 1:28–1:33The follower of the Upanishads calls him pure consciousness. Kekeler backslash as people
18. 1:33–1:39call him eternal and conscious. But not the maker. Penedriely backslash as joggins call
19. 1:39–1:44him a self untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach. The passiporters call
20. 1:44–1:48him free even of the rules that bind us. Shavers call him chiever,
21. 1:48–1:54Beishnarers, Vishnu, the tellers of Purirana, call in grand sire of all. The ritualist calls
22. 1:54–1:59him the one to whom the oblation is poured. The Digambarer calls him one free to body and
23. 1:59–2:04a vignance. The Mimamsarkar calls the deities of the mantras themselves, God. Even you,
24. 2:04–2:10Karabhavarkar, have some word for what ordinary people mean by backslash god dot bixlash.
25. 2:10–2:13A word, not a belief.
26. 2:13–2:15Even a word is data, friend.
27. 2:15–2:20My point stands, everyone in this hall already agrees that something is meant by backslush
28. 2:20–2:25guide backslush, and disagrees completely on what, that is not the ground for silence,
29. 2:25–2:28that is the very ground that demands inquiry.
30. 2:28–2:31We have heard enough from Scripture, it is time, now to reason.
31. 2:31–2:38The Veddo itself says, first hear, then reflect, and the elders add, through hearing,
32. 2:38–2:43Through reasoning, through the quiet practice of meditation, a soul comes at last to seal
33. 2:43–2:45itself truly.
34. 2:45–2:47So reflection begins.
35. 2:47–2:48Scene 3.
36. 2:48–2:50Five Doubts Named
37. 2:50–2:54Let me be honest about what stands against me before I offer a single proof.
38. 2:54–2:57Five doubts, and I will take them one by one across this bouquet.
39. 2:57–3:03One, there is no unseen supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all.
40. 3:03–3:07Two, even without such a cause, plain human striving is enough to explain ritual
41. 3:07–3:08and its fruits.
42. 3:08–3:113. There is positive evidence that God does not exist.
43. 3:11–3:154. Even if some proof of God is offered, that very proof will turn out invalid.
44. 3:15–3:205. No. Authoritative proof of God exists at all. Valid or not.
45. 3:20–3:24Good. Save them plainly. That is fair debate. Take the first, then.
46. 3:24–3:29Scene 4. Against. Back. Slash. No. Unseen cause. Back. Slash.
47. 3:29–3:33Look at how differently people act. Two men. Same circumstance.
48. 3:33–3:36Choose opposite paths. One turns to ritual.
49. 3:36–3:41one to indulgence, one to renunciation. That difference in tendency has causes,
50. 3:41–3:45and the chain of those causes has no first link we can point to. And whatever a man
51. 3:45–3:51reaps, he reaps in his own person, not another backslash s. So something unseen must connect
52. 3:51–3:57this life backslash s action to a fruit received beyond it. This world, thick with every kind of
53. 3:57–4:03suffering unequally dealt out, cannot be uncaused. An uncaused thing either exists always or never.
54. 4:03–4:07It does not arise here, cease there, on no schedule at all.
55. 4:07–4:14Yet, plainly, this world of ours does arise and cease on a schedule none of us set, therefore some cause beyond the scene.
56. 4:14–4:18Unless the effects simply arose by accident, no cause needed at all.
57. 4:18–4:24Seeing five, backslash by accident, backslash examined and refuted.
58. 4:24–4:30Say what you mean by backslash, accident, backslash, and I will show you collapses into one of four things.
59. 4:30–4:36No cause at all. Self-production. Production from nothing or merely a fact about the thing
60. 4:36–4:42backslush as own nature. None of the four survives. Every effect that comes to be has a clear
61. 4:42–4:46earlier limit. The moment before which it was not, and a clear later limit, the moment
62. 4:46–4:52after which it will not be. As it is, nothing marks that limit at that moment, except
63. 4:52–4:53a cause acting then.
64. 4:53–4:58But suppose the moment itself needs no further explanation. A thing simply has the property
65. 4:58–5:02of beginning to exist on this day rather than another the way space simply has the property
66. 5:02–5:03of being eternal.
67. 5:03–5:08Our property is shared by everything explains nothing about why this thing on this day.
68. 5:08–5:12If backslash beginning to exist whenever it does backslash were just each thing backslash
69. 5:12–5:14as spare nature with no cause behind it.
70. 5:14–5:20The very question backslash why then and not really your backslash would return endlessly
71. 5:20–5:21and answer nothing.
72. 5:21–5:24No, production needs a producer.
73. 5:24–5:25Chance is not an answer.
74. 5:25–5:28It is the question wearing in disguise.
75. 5:28–5:32Mean 6 on cause, general and particular.
76. 5:32–5:36Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say fire, arises from such different means, dry
77. 5:36–5:40grass rubbed, wood churned, sunlight gathered through a lens.
78. 5:40–5:45If cause determines effect strictly, how does one effect come from three, unlike origins?
79. 5:45–5:50Because causal power is known through observed correlation in each distinct context, not
80. 5:50–5:56proclaimed once for all context at once, grinding, churning, focusing, three different
81. 5:56–6:01causal complexes, each independently verified to yield fire under its own conditions.
82. 6:01–6:06Nothing in that variety damages the rule that in effect requires a sufficient cause.
83. 6:06–6:11It only shows that backslash, sufficient cause backslash can be realized more than one way.
84. 6:11–6:12The rule survives.
85. 6:12–6:15Only your picture of it was too narrow.
86. 6:15–6:17Assembly a murmur of a sin.
87. 6:17–6:22Scene 7 and scene merit as the cause of the world backslash s diversity.
88. 6:22–6:27granola. Why must have unseen merit and demerit, adrecia, be the missing cause?
89. 6:27–6:33Why not simply say ordinary, visible, auxiliary causes strung together to explain all the diversity
90. 6:33–6:36we see? Because of visible chains of cause alum explained
91. 6:36–6:41everything, no one would trouble to perform a single unrewarded ritual, and yet people
92. 6:41–6:47do expecting nothing here only hereafter. Ask why they persist, not for pleasure. The
93. 6:47–6:52unbeliever seeks pleasure more directly and skips the ritual, not for reputation alone
94. 6:52–6:57that fails to explain private devotion no one sees, not because elders deceive the young,
95. 6:57–7:02for the elders themselves keep the observance, and a deceiver does not usually deceive himself
96. 7:02–7:03first.
97. 7:03–7:06Some cunning founder inventing it all for his own gain, then the alone should have grown
98. 7:06–7:11rich and free, giving nothing away, yet the pattern runs the other direction entirely
99. 7:11–7:13the sincere giveaway what they have.
100. 7:13–7:17No way exhaustive account without an unseen throat survives a scrutiny.
101. 7:17–7:23unseen, some adrester must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that fruit.
102. 7:23–7:29Scene 8 Potency as an independent reality causality of absence.
103. 7:29–7:35narrator reads the section title, Udayana and the object to work through a longer technical
104. 7:35–7:41passage condensed here to its spine-dopk slash. Even so must this backslash potency backslash
105. 7:41–7:46you speak of be some separate reality over and above the visible substances that act could
106. 7:46–7:50could not mere absence of an obstruction be doing the causal work with nothing further
107. 7:50–7:51needed.
108. 7:51–7:56Absence can remove a hindrance, it cannot, by itself, produce a positive effect to make
109. 7:56–8:02bricks into a house you need not only the absence of the builder-backslush s-laziness,
110. 8:02–8:08but the mason-backslush s-hand, ritual likewise, does not merely clear a path. It lays down
111. 8:08–8:13something, a residual potency in the agent, that ripens later into a frout that residue
112. 8:13–8:20Israel, though unseen, its reality is inferred exactly as we infer fire from smoke, by its
113. 8:20–8:24necessary connection with an effect that has no other adequate explanation.
114. 8:24–8:29This is the same style of reasoning that will, in time, tarry us all the way to God and
115. 8:29–8:33inference from effect to a cause required by the effect.
116. 8:33–8:36Nothing mystical, nothing merely asserted.
117. 8:36–8:40Scene 9 Whom does ritual consecrate?
118. 8:40–8:42Exposition of Samkia and its Critique
119. 8:42–8:45the sound-care teacher rises dot pxlash.
120. 8:45–8:49Let me offer our school backslash s account.
121. 8:49–8:56Since it touches your very question, we hold that Prakriti, primordinal nature, unconscious
122. 8:56–9:02but active woven of the three gooners, undertakes all transformation of the world unaided for
123. 9:02–9:05the sake of Pyrrasha backslash s liberation.
124. 9:05–9:12no further cause. Unseen merit or God is required. Prakriti alone suffices as the ground of
125. 9:12–9:18ritual backslash s power and the world backslash s unfolding.
126. 9:18–9:23In elegant system, teacher and I will rant it much, but consider Prakriti as you describe
127. 9:23–9:29her as one undifferentiated at the route, acting always by the same essential nature,
128. 9:29–9:35a single uniform cause, left to itself cannot by itself explain the sequence of unlike
129. 9:35–9:41effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn, as she produces successively.
130. 9:41–9:45Something must account for the order of that succession, and that something is exactly the
131. 9:45–9:49kind of unseen, individuating cause I am arguing for.
132. 9:49–9:51Grant me that much.
133. 9:51–9:53We are no longer very far apart.
134. 9:53–9:55You have simply not yet given it the name I give it.
135. 9:55–10:00We will not settle that today, but I concede the difficulty is real.
136. 10:00–10:03In ten, the Carvaka is answered.
137. 10:03–10:08The Carvaka steps forward in patient dot px slash.
138. 10:08–10:09Enough delicacy.
139. 10:09–10:11There is no unseen anything.
140. 10:11–10:17What is not seen, touched, or reasoned from direct perception is simply not there to reason
141. 10:17–10:18about.
142. 10:18–10:19Ritual is habit.
143. 10:19–10:23The next world is a story told to keep the poor obedient.
144. 10:23–10:25Then answer me plainly.
145. 10:25–10:29Carvaka, why do sincere people perform rites that cost them, that bring them no worldly
146. 10:29–10:35return that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation, still they persist, quietly,
147. 10:35–10:36without display.
148. 10:36–10:41You have called it habit, but habit needs a first cause too, and every account you offer
149. 10:41–10:47– pleasure, custom, deception, a founder backflush s-cunning – collapses the moment
150. 10:47–10:50it is tested, as I have already shown this assembly.
151. 10:50–10:53What is not directly seen is not thereby proven false.
152. 10:53–10:57It is simply what must be established by inference, which is the very tool you yourself
153. 10:57–11:02used to work from smoke to fire, though you have never seen the two joined at the source.
154. 11:02–11:05Influence, I permit. Faith, I do not.
155. 11:05–11:10Then let us continue by inference alone. That is all I have asked of anyone in this hall.
156. 11:10–11:17Scene 11, the border and the doctrine of Momenturinus. The border steps forward, Dotpa slash.
157. 11:17–11:23Udea, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who ritually acts today
158. 11:23–11:30and reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit. Nothing endures. Every existent is
159. 11:30–11:36momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears. What you call backslash,
160. 11:36–11:42the same person backslash tomorrow, is only a causal series, each moment new.
161. 11:42–11:46Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was owned by a moment
162. 11:46–11:51that no longer exists at the time of rebelling? If nothing endures, even an instant longer than
163. 11:51–11:56its arising, the doer of the deed, and the receiver of the fruited ore, by your own account,
164. 11:56–12:02too different, unconnected momentary existence, and moral responsibility itself desolves.
165. 12:02–12:07Consider it too, how ordinary recognition works, I see a jar today, and know it as the same jar
166. 12:07–12:13I saw yesterday, not a new jar resembling the old, if that recognition of identity were always
167. 12:13–12:18delusion, no cognition of difference between two moments could stand as reliable either,
168. 12:18–12:22since both rest on the same faculty of comparing and cross-tying.
169. 12:22–12:28Deny persistence, rout, and branch, and you cannot even trust the doubt you have just raised against me
170. 12:28–12:32for even raising the doubt requires that the one who doubted a moment ago
171. 12:32–12:35and the one who now speaks are the same continuing self.
172. 12:35–12:39We say the continuity is causal, not substantial.
173. 12:39–12:43An ecological series sufficiently unified to carry karmic fraud across time is,
174. 12:43–12:47in every respect that matters, here, what I mean by an enduring self.
175. 12:47–12:52We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, month, but something persists. On that, this
176. 12:52–13:00bouquet cannot yield. Scene 12, persistence and causality reconciled, deal objection on the eternal self.
177. 13:00–13:07Grant persistence then. Scylph, if an object backsash, s very nature is to be a cause, must it not cause
178. 13:07–13:12its effect always everywhere, the moment it exists, the way blue is always blue. Yet an eternal,
179. 13:12–13:16all-pervading self is not seen to produce pleasure and pain at every moment.
180. 13:16–13:21How then can causality and an eternal self be reconciled at all?
181. 13:21–13:26Because causality is not backslush any object automatically produces any effect it is capable of,
182. 13:26–13:32always dot backslash it is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect,
183. 13:32–13:37ascertained sometimes by watching agreement and difference, where that gales as with something
184. 13:37–13:42eternal and everywhere present which cannot be absent anywhere to test the backslush difference
185. 13:42–13:48backslash side, ascertained instead through a reason that establishes the causal relation directly.
186. 13:48–13:53The self produces pleasure and pain only in conjunction with its proper auxiliary conditions,
187. 13:53–13:59mind, body, the ripening of that same unseen potency we spoke of earlier. Not everything
188. 13:59–14:05blue produces every blue thing backslash s affects at all times either a particular cause,
189. 14:05–14:11with its particular auxiliaries present, produces its particular effect that is simply what causality
190. 14:11–14:17means, once stated carefully, and ordinary experience confirms it at every turn.
191. 14:17–14:18CONTRUDING PRAYER
192. 14:18–14:20Scene 13.
193. 14:20–14:22CONTRUDING PRAYER OF THE FIRST BOUKEI
194. 14:22–14:28Udayana turns again toward the unseen image, the hall-quiet's dot-biss-slash.
195. 14:28–14:33That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals, each soul its portion, call it mayer,
196. 14:33–14:38since the mind cannot grasp at all, call it prayer-creedy, since all creation springs
197. 14:38–14:40from it.
198. 14:40–14:45Avalabdavidir, since knowledge loam disalls it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole
199. 14:45–14:50disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wait devotion in my heart,
200. 14:50–14:54stand as witness visibly to what I offer here."
201. 14:54–15:00Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sabbat, lamp still burning. As assembly murmurs,
202. 15:00–15:05some persuaded, some still folding their arms. The debate visibly unfinished, waiting
203. 15:05–15:10for the second bouquet dot biss slash.
204. 15:10–15:14Act 2 The Second Bukkeye of Flowers of Arguments Concerning
205. 15:14–15:21Valid Cognition, The Eternity of the Veda and the Possibility of a New Creation.
206. 15:21–15:27New Voice Joining this Act, the Mimum Saka, a Vedic ritualist scholar Curtis Button yielding
207. 15:27–15:33who holds that the Veda is awfulous and eternal and that cognition proves its own truth without
208. 15:33–15:36external help.
209. 15:36–15:43one why an Omniscient being is still needed. Curtain rises again on the same sabbath later
210. 15:43–15:47in the debate. Udayana stands where he left off dot-b-slash.
211. 15:47–15:52We have established, across the first bouquet, that an unseen destiny governs the fruit of
212. 15:52–15:58every act, but destiny itself must have some cause, and no creature among us can perceive
213. 15:58–16:03that cause directly. No one acts purposefully toward what lies wholly beyond cognition,
214. 16:03–16:09So some extraordinary omniscient being must exist, able to hand down to us true knowledge
215. 16:09–16:13that is not causally linked, so that we may act rightly at all.
216. 16:13–16:15Why reach for an omnipotent God?
217. 16:15–16:19You Deanna, when the beginningless and broken chain of Vedic tradition already carries that
218. 16:19–16:25knowledge to us, or if you distrust an awful asbedda, the sage Kapila and others attain
219. 16:25–16:29omniscience through yoga and discipline alone, neither requires your God.
220. 16:29–16:35This valid cognition depends on causes outside itself and the world is not on any account
221. 16:35–16:36unbroken.
222. 16:36–16:39It dissolves periodically entirely.
223. 16:39–16:44Scene 2 is validity known from within or from outside.
224. 16:44–16:48Before you reach for God, settle a smaller question first.
225. 16:48–16:50One might say, and you'll have long disputed.
226. 16:50–16:55When a cognition arises, is its truth known automatically, and the very arising of it?
227. 16:55–17:00I say yes. To cognize something at all simply is to take it as true.
228. 17:00–17:05What later proves false was, on inspection, never truly a cognition.
229. 17:05–17:08Then explained out, Mimamsaka.
230. 17:08–17:14If validity announced itself the instant a cognition arose, no cognition could ever be doubted.
231. 17:14–17:18Yet we doubt constantly the moment a cognition dos and backslash,
232. 17:18–17:21to resemble others already confirmed true.
233. 17:21–17:27Validity, like invalidity, is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing, a
234. 17:27–17:32further mark, a further inference, a test in successful action.
235. 17:32–17:37But your box-lush, external test box-lush invites its own regress.
236. 17:37–17:42If a second cognition is needed to certify the first, a third is needed to certify
237. 17:42–17:44the second, and so on without end.
238. 17:44–17:51Not so, because most of the time, certifying validity is simply unnecessary.
239. 17:51–17:54There is neither doubt nor a reason for doubt.
240. 17:54–18:00Belief in an object arises, and we act on it without any separate act of certification.
241. 18:00–18:06Only where doubt genuinely arises does the further inference come in, and there, it terminates,
242. 18:06–18:11because the redress you fear threatens your backslash, intrinsic validity backslash doctrine
243. 18:11–18:13exactly as much as mine.
244. 18:13–18:19You too must postulate that a cognition backslash, S backslash, being known backslash, is
245. 18:19–18:25itself validly postulated, prove that, and you are inferring all over again.
246. 18:25–18:26Affair hit.
247. 18:26–18:31Consider the thirsty man, who drinks the moment he sees water.
248. 18:31–18:36You backslash D. Say he directly perceives water backslash S. Power to quench thirst,
249. 18:36–18:39since he acts without hesitation.
250. 18:39–18:40He does not.
251. 18:40–18:45That power is inferred, instantly and unconsciously, from past experience.
252. 18:45–18:51The way desire itself is born from a swift, silent inference that a certain action gets
253. 18:51–18:53a certain result.
254. 18:53–19:00Swiftness is not same as an extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remained extrinsic.
255. 19:00–19:06Scene 3, Dream, Waking, and Warbuck Slash S2 Hands.
256. 19:06–19:10Then tell me how any of us tells Waking from Dreaming at all, you be honest, if my
257. 19:10–19:12My liberty is never simply given.
258. 19:12–19:16I dream I am drowning in a pond, the terror is total, indistinguishable in the moment from
259. 19:16–19:21any waking terror, until I wake and find no water anywhere.
260. 19:21–19:27And the moment you wake, the two states stand in sharp, undeniable opposition, the dim memory
261. 19:27–19:30of the dream against the vivid immediacy of waking.
262. 19:30–19:33At contrast is itself the criterion.
263. 19:33–19:38It does not need to be imported from anywhere else, because waking experience supplies its
264. 19:38–19:43So standard against which the dream is measured and found wanting.
265. 19:43–19:46The Western logician Ray Macharpa outstill.
266. 19:46–19:51A philosopher, Moore, may call him, held up both his hands before a hall and said,
267. 19:51–19:54Maxache, here is one hand, here is another.
268. 19:54–19:58Therefore external objects are real not Maxache, his critics answered.
269. 19:58–20:02If your merry eyes could be doubted, showing us your hands proves nothing.
270. 20:02–20:04Let them out on.
271. 20:04–20:11A bare logical possibility that evidence might someday surface against a fact is not the same as evidence that has surfaced.
272. 20:11–20:17Push that skepticism to its root, and you land on the law of uncontradiction itself.
273. 20:17–20:27Call it a tautology, if you like, empty of content, but even the skeptic must stand on it to say anything at all, including his doubt.
274. 20:27–20:31I do not need certainty invulnerable to every conceivable future.
275. 20:31–20:33I need what any reasonable inquiry needs.
276. 20:33–20:36The balance of evidence, honestly weighed.
277. 20:36–20:48And on that balance, Nia-Baxash's account of validity, known through Mark's external to bear cognition, confirmed by finally successful action, carries the greater weight.
278. 20:48–20:51Illusion and error are undeniable facts of experience.
279. 20:51–21:01If, as you Mimamsa could say, everything Cog-Eyes does thereby true, what, then, are illusion and error? You have no answer for that.
280. 21:01–21:05Scene 4. Proofs that sound is not eternal.
281. 21:05–21:09Grant me this much, then, and let me change ground.
282. 21:09–21:13Even without your God, the Vedas need not be authored at all.
283. 21:13–21:20The Vedas and the very sound it is made of may simply be eternal, requiring no faultless speaker and no author to answer for.
284. 21:20–21:26There I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing.
285. 21:26–21:33say, every day, backslash, that sound has stopped backslash, the drum was struck, and now it
286. 21:33–21:40is silent. That is a direct cognition of sound backslash as destruction. Sound cannot have
287. 21:40–21:45merely moved elsewhere, being formless, it cannot have been covered over, for covering
288. 21:45–21:51belongs to things with shape. It has not merely grown too faint for us, for the same
289. 21:51–21:56Excuse would prove that a shattered pot has not really broken, only become invisible.
290. 21:57–22:03But the ear cannot perceive that absence directly at substratum, ether, cannot be perceived at all.
291. 22:04–22:08The ear need not perceive ether to perceive the absence of sound in the ear,
292. 22:08–22:12precisely as darkness is perceived as the absence of light,
293. 22:12–22:16without anyone perceiving the invisible particles that would be its locus.
294. 22:17–22:19And listen to the sound itself.
295. 22:19–22:25Pitch rises, falls, loudens, softens, one and the same eternal thing cannot bear opposed
296. 22:25–22:27qualities at once.
297. 22:27–22:34What you call backslash, the same word, recognized again backslash, is a flame recognized again,
298. 22:34–22:39new fuel, new light, each moment, called by one name out of habit.
299. 22:39–22:44Production and destruction, not eternity, is what your own ear tells you, if you
300. 22:44–22:46will trust it.
301. 22:46–22:50The tradition will need to answer your dissuadlings, elsewhere.
302. 22:50–22:51It will.
303. 22:51–22:57For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken feather, is produced, and what
304. 22:57–22:59is produced can be lost.
305. 22:59–23:06Which returns us to the question, who restores it, each time the world dissolves, and forgets.
306. 23:06–23:07Scene 5.
307. 23:07–23:11How can a new creation even begin?
308. 23:11–23:12Suppose I grant dissolution.
309. 23:12–23:19during dissolution, on your own account, nothing moves, nothing acts, the sky itself stands empty and still.
310. 23:19–23:24What, then, could possibly initiate a new creation out of absolute stillness?
311. 23:24–23:29Consider deep sleep first, as a smaller case of the same puzzle.
312. 23:29–23:36In dreamless sleep, the self-max slash S cognition, desire, pleasure, and pain all fall silent together,
313. 23:36–23:42yet the body-max slash S breath continues, faint, and the self-wakes again damaged.
314. 23:42–23:49So to that cosmic dissolution, an extremely subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements,
315. 23:49–23:55to find a register as backslash, the world backslash, until its final stage marks the moment,
316. 23:55–24:03and becomes the seed of NUCREATION. It is not that a day must always be preceded by another day of its own kind,
317. 24:03–24:08the first day of the monsoon is preceded by the last day of summer, not by another rainy day.
318. 24:08–24:15So to the first day of a new creation is preceded by dissolution, not by another day of an old world.
319. 24:15–24:24And the first human beings, the first Brahmins, the first speakers of editor not all, no parent taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach.
320. 24:24–24:32As the first scorpion rises from Ra and Dunn, not from a scorpion parent, and only later generations breed true,
321. 24:32–24:39so the Supreme Lord may himself take the forms of Teacher and pupil at the world-back-slash-est on,
322. 24:39–24:44gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet-back-slash-est hand toward a distant object,
323. 24:44–24:49and in that gesture teach the very first convention of word and meaning.
324. 24:49–25:00From that first instruction the whole chain, potter to potter, weaver to weaver, teacher to student, descends unbroken until the next dissolution breaks it again.
325. 25:00–25:06Scene 6. The long decline, and why scripture needs restoring.
326. 25:06–25:11And do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today as it once did.
327. 25:11–25:13Look honestly at what has already frayed.
328. 25:13–25:18Right's once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches
329. 25:18–25:23how survive, if at all, through a single branch, imperfectly kept.
330. 25:23–25:29Dharma once stood on four legs, austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, charity.
331. 25:29–25:32Austerity fell, two legs remained.
332. 25:32–25:39Knowledge fell. One leg, charity, bears the whole weight now, and even that leg is wounded.
333. 25:39–25:42Then say plainly what you are building toward.
334. 25:42–25:52That scripture is not self-sustaining. Its authority depends on the Veda, not on the general good conduct of virtuous people copying one another,
335. 25:52–26:08For if virtuous conduct alone were sufficient to make an act obligatory, no scriptural injunction would be needed at all, and yet we all know rights that have lapsed entirely, with no living witness, that must one day be restored, not merely remembered.
336. 26:08–26:18Restoration needs a knower, and faith in scripture merely recognizes truth, it cannot manufacture it, once the original cause is gone.
337. 26:18–26:22Scene 7. Capilla is tested and found insufficient.
338. 26:23–26:33Then let Capilla serve us that knower, a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved by compassion for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost.
339. 26:33–26:38Test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend.
340. 26:38–26:43Meditation may indeed be a means of knowing what is otherwise hidden, I do not deny it
341. 26:43–26:49wholesale, but meditation does not automatically yield knowledge the instant it is practiced.
342. 26:49–26:53It needs some other means to confirm what it has found.
343. 26:53–26:59What confirms capilla-back-slash-s-meditation on compassion and on violence, whose fruits
344. 26:59–27:01no one has ever seen.
345. 27:01–27:06A coward meditates fruitfully on a snake only because he has met a snake before.
346. 27:06–27:12No one has met the fruit of yoga directly in this life or between two lives, for the body
347. 27:12–27:17that acts in this birth and the body that reaps the fruit in the next are not even the
348. 27:17–27:22same body and without some experienced link joining the two, the connection cannot be
349. 27:22–27:24verified at all.
350. 27:24–27:27It has said some remember form of births.
351. 27:27–27:30It is said, but not established.
352. 27:30–27:41A teacher who falls asleep on a holiday night and resumes yesterday backslash SSS an aton proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two.
353. 27:41–27:46And consider the very first promise at creation backslash S.T.O.N.
354. 27:46–27:52By what memory could they have known their own lineage if no one had yet been born to remember it?
355. 27:52–28:00No power of travel between worlds is proven either, that might have carried settlers in bearing a caste system readymade.
356. 28:00–28:17It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, omnipotent being, who needs no body, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, and to multiply unproven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly.
357. 28:17–28:23I will carry the question forward, Udayana. I do not yet carry your conclusion.
358. 28:23–28:28That is exactly as the debate should stand, at the end of its second round.
359. 28:28–28:33CNAID. Concluding prayer of the second bouquet.
360. 28:33–28:38Udayana turns, once more toward the unseen image.buckslash.
361. 28:38–28:46May my heart hold fast to shiver until life backslash, as last moment, he who, aided by the destinies of every being,
362. 28:46–28:54Bills this astonishing world again and again and like a magician doing his own trick and makes it again
363. 28:54–28:59Who's will run unopposed through the whole of the cosmos? Who is its final cause?
364. 28:59–29:03On that lord alone, let my devotion rest unmoved
365. 29:04–29:09Curtain falls slowly. A mimum soccer remains seated in thought as the lamp dims
366. 29:10–29:15Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted. Oh no one yet concedes.buck slash
367. 29:16–29:26Act 3. A third bouquet of flowers. Of arguments refuting every alleged proof that God does not exist.
368. 29:26–29:38The atheist, nastica, joins the flawless act, not a school so much as a stance, whatever cannot be caught by some means of knowledge, he holds, cannot be real.
369. 29:38–29:44The Mimamsarka, and the V.A.I.S.H.E.S.H.I.K.A. are precise.
370. 29:44–29:49Categorial Logician Cousin Tanaya also speak dot-back slash.
371. 29:49–29:55Scene 1, backslash, he is not seen, therefore he is not backslash.
372. 29:55–30:00Curtain rises. The lamp is trimmed higher. This bouquet is the hall backslash.
373. 30:00–30:03S most contested dot-back slash.
374. 30:03–30:27You have spent 2 bouquets building to Watermaker on the world, you may honor. I will spend this one demolishing the foundation. If God existed, He ought to be knowable, as a cow-back-sash-shawn is knowable by its shape and color. He is not known. Therefore He does not exist, exactly as a hair-back-sash-shawn does not exist, precisely because, though its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one has ever perceived one.
375. 30:27–30:34one. A clean argument, and cleanly wrong at its first step. Your inference works only
376. 30:34–30:40where the object was already granted to be perceptible, the hairback slash ass horn fails
377. 30:40–30:45the test of perception it was always eligible to sit. God was never claimed by any theist
378. 30:45–30:51in this hall to be an object of ordinary perception at all. You cannot fault an unseen thing
379. 30:51–30:57for failing a test it was never entered into. Then how is he known, if not by the
380. 30:57–30:59The one method you out-exempt him from.
381. 30:59–31:06My inference, which is precisely what these five bouquets exist to supply, save your strongest
382. 31:06–31:11objection for the fifth, when the inferences themselves stand before you.
383. 31:11–31:13For now I only clear the ground.
384. 31:13–31:19Non-apprehension of a thing never claimed to be apprehensible proves a thing.
385. 31:19–31:25Seen to, sleep, the self, and what non-apprehension cannot touch.
386. 31:25–31:30your own self, then, as a test case, in dreamless sleep you do not apprehend your own self,
387. 31:30–31:35yet you do not conclude, on waking, that you have ceased to exist. Why does the same silence,
388. 31:35–31:39applied to God, not equally prove his absence?
389. 31:39–31:44Because in sleep the causes that would produce self-cognition are simply not assembled, the
390. 31:44–31:50mind has withdrawn from the senses, not because the self has vanished, but because the instrument
391. 31:50–31:57of noticing it has gone quiet. The very fact you rely on that no one doubts their own continued
392. 31:57–32:02existence through a dreamless eye is itself proof that unapprehension does not entail
393. 32:02–32:08unexistence. You have refuted your own method with your own example.
394. 32:08–32:12Then try this instead, a conscious being ought to show bodily activity as the sprouting
395. 32:12–32:17seed shows the God of a box-ass hand. No divine activity is seen before a single
396. 32:17–32:20sprout appears. No activity, no agent.
397. 32:20–32:26A pot needs an embodied potter. The world does not thereby need an embodied maker of the
398. 32:26–32:32identical kind. The self persists, unmoving, through sleep, through fainting, through the
399. 32:32–32:38stillness of poison, or extreme cold, without any bodily sign at all. Different effects
400. 32:38–32:43proceed from different kinds of causes, and there is no law-binding every maker to
401. 32:43–32:45a visible hand.
402. 32:45–32:503. The Carvaka backslash S wager and why it cannot be cached.
403. 32:50–32:55The Carvaka steps in sharper than before dot backslash.
404. 32:55–33:00Let me strip this down for the most racist vass. I do not even require backslash knowable
405. 33:00–33:05but a known backslash as your loophole. My rule is simpler. What is not known in any
406. 33:05–33:10sense does not exist. What is known exists. God is never known. Finished.
407. 33:10–33:15Then finish it, Carfaka, and see where it leads you.
408. 33:15–33:21On your rule, the moment you step outside your own house, you no longer perceive your wife,
409. 33:21–33:26your children, your stored brain, by your own law, they must be judged destroyed the
410. 33:26–33:28instant your eyes leave them.
411. 33:28–33:30Do you believe that?
412. 33:30–33:32Memory assures me they remain.
413. 33:32–33:35Memory assures you have many destroyed things too.
414. 33:35–33:40A childhood house long, since fallen, a friend long dead.
415. 33:40–33:43The alone cannot certify present existence.
416. 33:43–33:48The instant you leave on memory to save your family from your own rule, you have conceded
417. 33:48–33:50exactly what I need.
418. 33:50–33:53Non-apprehension does not prove non-existence.
419. 33:53–33:58And consider that I itself, the very organ your backslash, seeing backslash, depends
420. 33:58–34:03on is never itself seen, yet you do not doubt it exists.
421. 34:03–34:08Your rule, followed honestly, destroys your own instrument of doubting.
422. 34:08–34:13conduct does not need certainty. It runs on probability, general agreement, tested by
423. 34:13–34:14use.
424. 34:14–34:20Then where does probability lie on your account? If a thing is seen, you say it's existence
425. 34:20–34:27is certain. If unseen, its absence is certain. You have left no middle ground for probability
426. 34:27–34:32to stand on at all. You have described a doctrine with no room for the very mode
427. 34:32–34:35of belief you say it rests on.
428. 34:35–34:39for. Why inference itself survives the doubt?
429. 34:39–34:45Rent inference some ground, then, if you insist. But how is that about it ever finally removed?
430. 34:45–34:49Every absorbed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition
431. 34:49–34:53we haven't backslash the thought to check. That threat never closes.
432. 34:53–34:59It closes the moment you notice something you have already conceded. To doubt a future
433. 34:59–35:04deviation, you must already be able to think about the future, and that very capacity
434. 35:04–35:11inference extended from present time through hour, day, and season. You cannot use inference
435. 35:11–35:17to attack inference without borrowing the very tool you are trying to disqualify. And practically,
436. 35:17–35:22doubt ends where a counterfactual would trap the doubter in his own contradiction. The
437. 35:22–35:29eye that cause and effect are reliably connected, and the very act of doubting, itself an effect,
438. 35:29–35:31Could never have arisen in you at all.
439. 35:31–35:36A reasonable mind does not chase every conceivable exception forever.
440. 35:36–35:41It follows a reason, whose pervasion has been tested, and holds, and acts.
441. 35:42–35:45Carry it forward, then. I will listen to the rest.
442. 35:45–35:52Scene 5. Comparison. And the fifth UK Backslash S-Coming Test. Set aside.
443. 35:52–35:59One more avenue, yo Diana, before you move on. Some old backslash, comparison backslash,
444. 35:59–36:05cognition, pro-observed similarity, to be its own independent means of knowledge, distinct
445. 36:05–36:12from perception and inference. If so, a difficulty for your follows, everything known resembles
446. 36:12–36:17something else already known, but the god you describe as nothing else similar to many
447. 36:17–36:22could comparison in proven absence by that very singularity?
448. 36:22–36:30Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor unbeking, and no such third kind exists.
449. 36:30–36:36Being and unbeing exhaust the field, then I won, and you have thereby affirmed it other.
450. 36:36–36:43Similarity is simply a property of things that already are sorted under one or the other of those two categories.
451. 36:43–36:49It needs no independent status, and therefore yields no independent weapon against a being
452. 36:49–36:53who happens, by his nature, to be singular.
453. 36:53–36:59Uniqueness is not a defect that argument can weaponize, it is simply a fact some subjects
454. 36:59–37:02have and others don't.
455. 37:02–37:03Scene 6.
456. 37:03–37:08Verbal Testimony, and the dispute over an omniscient author.
457. 37:08–37:12Then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole book is a close-bock to
458. 37:12–37:14whether the VEDA needs an author at all.
459. 37:14–37:17The Vesha Shaka treats an ordinary sentence
460. 37:17–37:17like,
461. 37:17–37:18Slash,
462. 37:18–37:20As meaning as something inferred from the speaker
463. 37:20–37:20Bach Slash,
464. 37:20–37:21As intention,
465. 37:21–37:24Testimony reduced to a kind of inference.
466. 37:24–37:25My own school Bach Slash,
467. 37:25–37:26As Prabhaka,
468. 37:26–37:27A branch,
469. 37:27–37:28Go further,
470. 37:28–37:29Only the VEDA,
471. 37:29–37:30Being authorless,
472. 37:30–37:32Car in independent authority,
473. 37:32–37:34An ordinary human sentence is trust,
474. 37:34–37:38While the only one inference has certified the speaker reliable.
475. 37:38–37:42Both positions ask testimony to do more work than it needs to.
476. 37:42–37:59The moment you already know a word backslash s expressive power, the sentence backslash s meaning arrives with the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker backslash s reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all.
477. 37:59–38:05A child, who does not yet know whether the Vedas as an author still understands the Vedic
478. 38:05–38:08sentence perfectly well the moment he hears it.
479. 38:08–38:13That alone shows understanding does not wait on settling authorship first.
480. 38:13–38:18Testimony is its own means of knowledge, standing beside perception and inference,
481. 38:18–38:22not smuggled inference wearing a disguise.
482. 38:22–38:26Then can set up a sharper objection some raise directly against you, if an omniscient
483. 38:26–38:32create a composed even human language itself at the world-backslash-s-dawn, teaching the first
484. 38:32–38:37because word by word, how could such teaching ever get off the ground, with no shared word yet
485. 38:37–38:44existing between teacher and pupil to teach with? As I have already shown you, in the second bouquet,
486. 38:44–38:50through gesture before word, exactly as a puppeteer-backslash-s-cord makes a puppet-backslash-s
487. 38:50–38:56hand-point at a distant thing, and the watching child in first meaning from the pointing before
488. 38:56–39:02or any word is spoken at all. Instruction need not presuppose language completed.
489. 39:02–39:08It can begin language, gesture first, word following. I do not ask you to accept this
490. 39:08–39:14today. I only ask you to notice that the objection, however sharp it sounds, has already been
491. 39:14–39:15met.
492. 39:15–39:23Scene 7. Postulation and not apprehension, briefly weighed and found insufficient.
493. 39:23–39:28The narrator reads the remaining section titles together, briskly, as Yuvea honor answers each
494. 39:28–39:34in turn, the pace quickened here, a flurry rather than a dual dot backslash.
495. 39:34–39:39Examination of Postulation as an Independent means of Knowledge.
496. 39:39–39:45Examination of Not-Apprehension as an Independent means of Knowledge, and further examination
497. 39:45–39:46of the same.
498. 39:46–39:51One dependent of the Yuvea honor since you have answered comparison and testimony,
499. 39:51–39:56Postulation, first, the inference forced on us when a known fact makes no sense otherwise.
500. 39:56–40:02Does postulation not, in some case, force us to explain the world without God, and so crowd him out?
501. 40:03–40:11Show me the fact that only makes sense without a maker, and I will answer it directly, but no one in this hall has yet produced one.
502. 40:11–40:26Every alleged case of backslash, postulation against God backslash, turns out, an inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation backslash's name, and ordinary inference I have already answered at length.
503. 40:26–40:32Then no apprehension, once more, in its fullest form, not merely Baxash, I have not seen him
504. 40:32–40:37Baxash, which you answered in the first scene, but the deeper mimosa claim that no apprehension
505. 40:37–40:41is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that its silence regarding God should
506. 40:41–40:44count as positive evidence.
507. 40:44–40:50Trace it carefully, and it collapses into perception after all, un-normal, un-impaired sense
508. 40:50–40:56produces the determinate cognition backslash, no pot here backslash, by apprehending the place
509. 40:56–41:02where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences in general.
510. 41:02–41:08And the faculty that is, at bottom, perception in other guys inherits exactly the limit perception
511. 41:08–41:15already had. It can report the absence only of what it was ever fit to detect in the first place.
512. 41:15–41:26God was never within that fitness. The silence proves nothing new. It only restates. For the third time this UK, the very first answer I gave you.
513. 41:26–41:35Then I have exhausted perception, inference, and apprehension, comparison, testimony, and postulation, and none of them has delivered me your absence.
514. 41:35–41:44Not exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time. That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole UK.
515. 41:44–41:48CNAIT. Closing Prayer of the Third Bukkei.
516. 41:48–41:55Uday on the turns, one last time this act, toward the unseen image.buckslash.
517. 41:55–42:02With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshiped across every tradition in this hall under a hundred names,
518. 42:02–42:08whose quiet festival of bliss no rival joy equals, whose reality no perception can catch,
519. 42:08–42:14can catch and discard no inference overturn no other means of knowledge unseat and on
520. 42:14–42:19whom, in the end, every one of those means of knowledge itself depends to be trustworthy
521. 42:19–42:20at all.
522. 42:20–42:21Curtain falls.
523. 42:21–42:27The atheist remains standing a moment longer than the rest of the assembly before he,
524. 42:27–42:32too, sits dot back slash.
525. 42:32–42:33Act 4.
526. 42:33–42:35The Fourth Book of Flowers.
527. 42:35–42:41of arguments concerning God as Noah, and the true nature of cognition.
528. 42:41–42:47The shortest bouquet, and the most inward turning, having secured that God exists, and cannot
529. 42:47–42:53be disproved, the whole now asks what it even means to call an unmoving, all knowing
530. 42:53–42:59being a backslash, Noah backslash, at all. The mim-a-m-saka carries most of the argument
531. 42:59–43:01This act dot back slash.
532. 43:01–43:06Scene one. Can omniscience even be valid cognition?
533. 43:06–43:10Curtain rises on the same lamplit subar, later still.
534. 43:10–43:18Udiana looks tired in the good way, a debater deep into his case, not worn down by it dot back slash.
535. 43:18–43:23One more difficulty, Udiana, and it strikes at the root of everything you have built.
536. 43:23–43:25You call God omniscient.
537. 43:25–43:35But valid cognition, by definition, must know something not already known, otherwise memory itself would count as a valid means of knowledge, which no one accepts.
538. 43:35–43:39God-back-slash is knowledge in total, nothing is ever new to him.
539. 43:39–43:45If nothing is ever new to him, on your own definition, nothing he knows can count as valid knowledge at all.
540. 43:45–43:52And if his knowledge is not valid, he is no trust when they offer a benefit, including the matter you have spent rebuking defending.
541. 43:52–43:56And the flaw is in that definition, not in God.
542. 43:56–44:02Maxash, knowing what was not known before Maxash, cannot be what makes a cognition true.
543. 44:02–44:12It is both too narrow and too wide. Too narrow. See the same jar twice, and the second seeing is every bit as true as the first, though nothing is new in it.
544. 44:12–44:18Too wide, an illusion may present something never seen before, and still be false.
545. 44:18–44:22Now will detract neither truth nor falsehood.
546. 44:22–44:27What makes a cognition true is simply this, that it corresponds to how the thing actually
547. 44:27–44:28is.
548. 44:28–44:34By that measure, God-backslash-S-cognition, being total and never in error, is as true
549. 44:34–44:40as any cognition could be, whether or not any of it is backslash-New-backslash-to-him.
550. 44:40–44:45Then how do you distinguish a second tricy and not the same God from mere memory?
551. 44:45–44:47We do not call memory a means of knowledge.
552. 44:48–44:53Because memory depends entirely on a prior cognition to borrow its content from, it can
553. 44:53–44:55authorize from a thing.
554. 44:55–45:01A fresh seeing of the same jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through
555. 45:01–45:04its own causes, not recalled from a store.
556. 45:04–45:08And God-back-slash-sk's case is simpler still than either.
557. 45:08–45:13His cognition of the whole universe is a single, self-identical act, dependent on
558. 45:13–45:18no other cognition before it, needing no second glance at anything.
559. 45:18–45:23Call it neither new nor old, it simply is entire, all at once.
560. 45:24–45:30Scene 2. A bid for backslash, known as backslash, pre-attempts, pre-failure.
561. 45:31–45:38Let me try a different door then. Surely cognition does something to its object, leaves some mark on it.
562. 45:38–45:46We call this mark backslash, known as backslash. The property an object gains, simply by being known, of having been known.
563. 45:46–45:52Without it, box-sh being produced box-sh in your own inference for a divine make-up becomes untrustworthy
564. 45:52–45:58because an agent who leaves no trace on what he touches can hardly be said to know his own materials.
565. 45:58–46:03Three ways to argue for such a mark and unsurvive testing.
566. 46:03–46:09First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a result,
567. 46:09–46:16and that result is known as a ten-arrow shot at the empty sky produces no result in the sky.
568. 46:16–46:21Cognition may be like that arrow. Real motion, no mark left behind.
569. 46:21–46:29Second, that we say backslash, the pot is known backslash, and this phrase itself proves some new property sits on the pot.
570. 46:29–46:37But we equally say backslash, the pot was destroyed backslash, the pot that no longer exists to receive any property at all.
571. 46:37–46:44Language describing a relation to an act does not, by itself, prove a real residue in the object.
572. 46:44–46:51Third, that the very fact we can talk about cognition proves some perceptible trace it leaves.
573. 46:51–46:56But the causes that let us talk about a cognition are the very same causes that produced the
574. 46:56–46:58cognition in the first place.
575. 46:58–47:02Nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk.
576. 47:02–47:08Then on the sixth plane nothing but cognition box-ish, as only chuddleson box-ish, do you
577. 47:08–47:10already explain on it's own?
578. 47:10–47:17So, a cognition of a part is a cognition of a part by its own nature, exactly as an effort
579. 47:17–47:22to lift a stone is an effort concerning that stone by its own nature, without either one
580. 47:22–47:26depositing some third thing into what it touches.
581. 47:26–47:27Scene 3.
582. 47:27–47:30Is cognition itself something we perceive?
583. 47:30–47:35Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself.
584. 47:35–47:40How do you even know cognition has a card, if not through some form of cognition perceiving
585. 47:40–47:43endlessly, one behind the next.
586. 47:43–47:45Not endlessly, directly.
587. 47:45–47:49The moment an indeterminate awareness of some external thing arises,
588. 47:49–47:54the very fact of being a cognition is already faintly present alongside it to the mind.
589. 47:54–47:59On the next moment, when a further cognition of that same object arises,
590. 47:59–48:03the mind turns and knows the earlier cognition determinately.
591. 48:03–48:06The way a first fire recognized in one backslash
592. 48:06–48:12slash, S own kitchen let one recognize, by the same mark, a second fire glimpsed later
593. 48:12–48:18on a distant hill through its smoke. Cognition is not itself perceived through some second,
594. 48:18–48:24separate cognition standing outside it, the mind back slash, S direct relation to the
595. 48:24–48:31self, in whom cognition in hears, is enough. Then answer the harder form of the question.
596. 48:31–48:35On your school backslash, a zone account, a cognition last-sparely two or three moments
597. 48:35–48:36before it perishes.
598. 48:36–48:41If it is that brief, how does it last long enough both to reveal its object and to be
599. 48:41–48:45caught, itself, by the mind looking back at it?
600. 48:45–48:50And does that fleeting cognition, in its second moment, still grasp the very same object
601. 48:50–48:56it grasped in the first, or has the object, in that instant, already changed?
602. 48:56–49:01The same object, held across both moments, nothing stranger is required than granting
603. 49:01–49:08that a cognition, once a reason, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction,
604. 49:08–49:16to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind-backslash-as-next-plans.
605. 49:16–49:21Chase the alternative you-backslash-regesturing-to-word, that each vanishing instant would need its
606. 49:21–49:27zone vanishing backslash, known as backslash, to certify it, and that known as it's own
607. 49:27–49:32further known as to certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one level up, the same
608. 49:32–49:37infinite regress you were trying to rescue backslash, known as backslash, from in the
609. 49:37–49:44first place. Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not multiplying it.
610. 49:44–49:51Scene 4. What backslash, nor backslash, means, for a being, who does not act.
611. 49:51–49:56everything so far. Still, every backslash means a knowledge backslash. We have ever named
612. 49:56–50:01this defined by doing something. Did I act upon light? An inference acts through a middle
613. 50:01–50:06term, a word acts through a speaker backslash, a deterrence. God, on your account, does none
614. 50:06–50:11of this, no sense contact, no middle term, no speech act producing his knowledge. By
615. 50:11–50:16what right? Then, do you still call him a knower at all, using a word built entirely
616. 50:16–50:18out of agency?
617. 50:18–50:23The ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word backslash, s meaning, not the
618. 50:23–50:26whole of how it is actually used.
619. 50:26–50:31We call a sense faculty a backslash, means of knowledge backslash, because it is causally
620. 50:31–50:33involved in producing cognition.
621. 50:33–50:39We call God a backslash, knower backslash, for a different, equally legitimate reason.
622. 50:39–50:44Cognition simply resides in him, as a permanent feature of what he is, without needing to
623. 50:44–50:46be produced by anything at all.
624. 50:46–50:54A person can be a knower without, at this instant, being an agent of anything, knowing does not require doing.
625. 50:54–51:03Nor need I claim his cognition is some fifth, undiscovered means of knowledge alongside perception, inference, testimony, and the rest.
626. 51:03–51:13Broaden backslash, perception backslash, to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not perception through sense contact specifically,
627. 51:13–51:18and God-back-slash-S knowing falls naturally under that wider sense,
628. 51:18–51:21without forcing a new category into being.
629. 51:21–51:22Scene 5
630. 51:22–51:27Does knowing every error make God-back-slash-S cognition erroneous?
631. 51:27–51:30One last thrust, and then I yield the spookay.
632. 51:30–51:35If God is omniscient, He knows every false belief every creature has ever held,
633. 51:35–51:39every illusion, every mistaken inference, every dream.
634. 51:39–51:42But then the objects of all error are, in some sense,
635. 51:42–51:44present within them own cognition too.
636. 51:44–51:48Does that not make this cognition itself short for an error?
637. 51:48–51:51And if the knowledge already contains our mistakes,
638. 51:51–51:54what use is then teaching and dispelling them?
639. 51:54–51:57You have confused the error with the knowledge of the error, friend,
640. 51:57–52:02and that confusion is exactly the kind of mistake God-back-slash-es cognition,
641. 52:02–52:05unlike ours, never makes.
642. 52:05–52:06An illusion is false.
643. 52:06–52:10But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion,
644. 52:10–52:12This is a false cognition.
645. 52:12–52:15Backslash is not itself false.
646. 52:15–52:17It is precisely the opposite.
647. 52:17–52:21Clarity about falsehood, not participation in it.
648. 52:21–52:26God knows every error and actually and it actually is an error and a cognition that
649. 52:26–52:28correctly seems error and error in.
650. 52:28–52:32By the very definition we settled at the start of this bouquet.
651. 52:32–52:33True.
652. 52:33–52:37Far from undermining his teaching, that is the only thing that makes his teaching worth
653. 52:37–52:39anything at all.
654. 52:39–52:45He does not merely hold our mistakes alongside his own truths, he sees them as mistakes,
655. 52:45–52:51which is precisely what we, still caught inside them, cannot yet do for ourselves.
656. 52:51–52:55I have carried forward a case of doubt into this hall, you the are are, and you have
657. 52:55–52:58met everyone of them without once raising your voice.
658. 52:58–53:03I do not yet call myself an sudden fool, but I no longer call myself your opponent
659. 53:03–53:07either, only your most stubborn student.
660. 53:07–53:10The debate has no better outcome than that, friend.
661. 53:10–53:12Sit, and rest a moment.
662. 53:12–53:16What remains is our defense any longer.
663. 53:16–53:17Scene 6.
664. 53:17–53:20Turning toward the 5th Bukkei.
665. 53:20–53:24No concluding prayer is given for this Bukkei in the source text.
666. 53:24–53:29The surviving pages move directly from the discussion of God-back-slash, as knowledge
667. 53:29–53:32of error into the great positive proofs.
668. 53:32–53:36The writer marks the turn, instead.back-slash.
669. 53:36–53:58The doubt that no unseen cause exists, the doubt that ritual needs no God, the claim that God can be disproved outright, and, in this fourth and shortest bouquet, the question of what it even means to call so still a being a backslash, no dot backslash, every doubt raised against him has been met and turned.
670. 53:58–54:05against him has been met and turned. One task remains, greater than all the rest, not merely
671. 54:05–54:12to defend the Citadel, but to build it. Eight proofs, standing on their own feet, requiring
672. 54:12–54:18no opponent backslash, s first move at all. That is the fifth bouquet, and the summit
673. 54:18–54:26of this whole garden. Curtain falls softly, no music offending, only a pause, lamp trimmed
674. 54:26–54:28writer for what follows.
675. 54:28–54:30Act 5.
676. 54:30–54:34The Fifth Book of Flowers.
677. 54:34–54:38The Eight Proofs Establishing God-Bag-Slash-S-Existence.
678. 54:38–54:40The Summit of the Debate.
679. 54:40–54:43You day are no longer merely answers,
680. 54:43–54:46he builds, proof after proof,
681. 54:46–54:48each one standing on its own feet.
682. 54:48–54:52The atheist, the Convaker, the Mimmsarker,
683. 54:52–54:59The lamp here teacher, the border, and the VASHESHIK are all present in the hall, no longer opposing
684. 54:59–55:04in turn, but listening as one assembly to a case finally being made in full dot book
685. 55:04–55:06slash.
686. 55:06–55:07Scene 1.
687. 55:07–55:09Framing the gate.
688. 55:09–55:11Curtain rises for the last time.
689. 55:11–55:13The lamp burns steady.
690. 55:13–55:18You day are not stand at the center of the hall, and for once no one interrupts
691. 55:18–55:21him at the start dot book slash.
692. 55:21–55:28book case, and I have done nothing yet, but clear drowned, answering doubt, refuting attack,
693. 55:28–55:34defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending. Eight proofs stand before
694. 55:34–55:40you, each sufficient on its own, needing no opponent backslash, as first move to exist
695. 55:40–55:46at all. That the world is an effect. That the first motion in the atoms requires a mover.
696. 55:46–55:49The world is sustained, but it is destroyed.
697. 55:49–55:54At the very convention of word and craft required a first teacher.
698. 55:54–55:58At the validity of the scriptural tradition demands a trustworthy source.
699. 55:58–56:02That scripture itself testifies to its author.
700. 56:02–56:08That even bare number, two-ness, three-ness, in things too small for any of us to count,
701. 56:08–56:10bears the mark of accounting mind.
702. 56:10–56:15Test each one as harshly as you have tested everything else I have said this evening.
703. 56:15–56:20I ask only that you test them one at a time, on their own ground.
704. 56:20–56:25Begin, then. I have not conceded easily tonight, and I will not begin now.
705. 56:26–56:29Good. That is exactly how this should end.
706. 56:29–56:33Scene 2. The first proof. The world is an effect.
707. 56:34–56:41There, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a pot is produced.
708. 56:41–56:44And a thing produced lacks a producer.
709. 56:44–56:47Therefore, the world has a maker.
710. 56:47–56:50Then that maker has a body, as every potter does.
711. 56:50–56:55And if he has a body, he is not the bodiless god you have been building toward for Forbuu case.
712. 56:55–56:59Press that objection and watch it fall through your own hands.
713. 56:59–57:05Either you are claiming God has a body, in which case you have already granted he exists,
714. 57:05–57:11and merely quibble about his shape, or you are claiming the world was made by an embodied being,
715. 57:11–57:18and conclude from that alone that it was not made at all, which contradicts the very inference you are supposedly answering.
716. 57:18–57:24A general cause need not share every feature of the particular causes we happen to have seen before.
717. 57:24–57:29Fire is inferred from smoke, regardless of which fuel burned.
718. 57:29–57:34A maker is inferred from a made world, regardless of whether that maker wears a body.
719. 57:34–57:39Backshash, embodied backshash, was never the load-bearing part of my proof.
720. 57:39–57:41You have argued against a word I did not need.
721. 57:42–57:46Scene 3. The Second Proof. Motion in the Atoms.
722. 57:47–57:54Consider the Atoms themselves, then, before they ever became a backshash, world backshash, at all.
723. 57:54–58:01At creation backshash, its first instant, Atoms that had never before moved began to move, and combine.
724. 58:01–58:06What in inert cannot move itself, a spade does not swing itself into the earth.
725. 58:06–58:09Something conscious must impale it.
726. 58:09–58:14Destiny alone might account for that first motion, without any conscious impeller at all.
727. 58:15–58:21Destiny is one cause among several needed, teacher, not a cause that crowds out all the others.
728. 58:21–58:28An inert thing, precisely because it is inert, needs a locus of consciousness to set it moving,
729. 58:28–58:30exactly as a spade needs a hand.
730. 58:30–58:48You may call the specific motion of a living body backslash different in kind backslash from the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define backslash bodily motion backslash any way you choose, and you will find the definition already assumes exactly what I am arguing.
731. 58:48–58:57A special motion, produced by a conscious agent. You cannot use the very thing under dispute to disqualify the inference that establishes it.
732. 58:57–59:03Scene 4, the third and fourth proofs, sustaining and destruction.
733. 59:04–59:13The world, immense and heavy as it is, does not fall, as a bird-back-slash-esprit-weight does not fall, sustained by its own effort in flight.
734. 59:13–59:20Something sustains the whole of it, moment to moment, the way effort sustains a living body.
735. 59:20–59:30And when that same world is later destroyed, down to the smallest indivisible pair of atoms, destruction, too, requires an agent capable of it.
736. 59:30–59:35Precisely as class is destroyed only by the tearing hand, not by nothing.
737. 59:35–59:41Bestinia again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a destroyer.
738. 59:41–59:48Bestinia is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause of knowledge is not every cause excluded.
739. 59:48–1:00:02If Bestinia Loan explained the body-back-slash-ass-sustenance, effort itself would have no work left to do in keeping a living creature upright, which is plainly false, as any of us standing in this hall could tell you.
740. 1:00:02–1:00:16Sustaining and destroying are, each one, effects. Effects need agents. The world-back-slash-ass-mastness is no exemption from a rule that governs every smaller thing we have ever watched rise and fall.
741. 1:00:16–1:00:21Scene 5. The Fifth Proof. Who taught the first word?
742. 1:00:21–1:00:29Consider something closer to home, Anathems. The very conventions by which any of us here understands the other.
743. 1:00:29–1:00:36A Potter backslash S-Craft is learned from another Potter. A Weaver backslash S. From another Weaver.
744. 1:00:36–1:00:41A Child learns the alphabet from a teacher who learned it from a teacher before.
745. 1:00:41–1:00:52Trace that chain back far enough, and you reach a first link, a first podder with no podder to learn from, a first speaker with no language yet spoken to be taught in.
746. 1:00:52–1:00:59Perhaps the chain simply has no forced link, beginningless, like the round of re-bought itself.
747. 1:00:59–1:01:06The cycle of creation, and dissolution is beginningless, monk, I do not dispute that.
748. 1:01:06–1:01:12But within any one cycle, at its own fresh dawn, there are no fallen or ordinary human beings
749. 1:01:12–1:01:15yet available to have originated anything.
750. 1:01:15–1:01:21Something must set the very first convention moving, in each new beginning, the way a puppeteer
751. 1:01:21–1:01:27backsash s-jester, a chord-pulled, a hand-pointed, teaches a watching child the meaning of a
752. 1:01:27–1:01:31word before any word has yet been spoken between them.
753. 1:01:31–1:01:35That first teacher need not keep a body permanently.
754. 1:01:35–1:01:40Scripture itself records a being who takes form again and again, precisely to renew what
755. 1:01:40–1:01:43would otherwise be lost.
756. 1:01:43–1:01:44Scene 6.
757. 1:01:44–1:01:46The 6th and 7th Proofs.
758. 1:01:46–1:01:48A trustworthy tradition.
759. 1:01:48–1:01:50And scripture backslash.
760. 1:01:50–1:01:52A sound word.
761. 1:01:52–1:01:55Then let me meet you on my own ground, one final time.
762. 1:01:55–1:02:00You say the Vedic tradition backslash is validity itself proves a sauce behind it.
763. 1:02:00–1:02:06validity on my skill box.S teaching needs no external guarantee. It is simply what a
764. 1:02:06–1:02:12properly caused cognition already is. And if every cognition backslash.S validity
765. 1:02:12–1:02:17needed a further cognition to certify it, we would face the same redress that has
766. 1:02:17–1:02:22followed us since the second bouquet. A redress I answered then and answer again
767. 1:02:22–1:02:28now. A tradition this vast, this stable, held by learned people across every
768. 1:02:28–1:02:34generation is not the kind of thing a single limited person invents from nothing. It requires,
769. 1:02:34–1:02:40at its root, one being of the requisite excellence to originate it truly. And scripture does
770. 1:02:40–1:02:47not merely imply such a source, it names one. In passage after passage, unprompted by any
771. 1:02:47–1:02:52need for praise, the meta speaks of itself as issuing from a knowing mouth. Backslash,
772. 1:02:52–1:02:59This made a issue for me in every cycle an U.X.Lash, a collection of sentences accepted
773. 1:02:59–1:03:04on its own authority by every knowledgeable person who has ever studied it, resting on
774. 1:03:04–1:03:10a thing beyond itself, is not the same thing as an ordinary human composition whose author
775. 1:03:10–1:03:12merely goes unnamed.
776. 1:03:12–1:03:15You have carried that thread across for a case to reach here.
777. 1:03:15–1:03:21I recognize the shape of the argument, even if I have not yet fully laid down my own.
778. 1:03:21–1:03:25is honest, and it is enough for tonight.
779. 1:03:25–1:03:26Scene 7.
780. 1:03:26–1:03:27An interlude.
781. 1:03:27–1:03:28Who commands?
782. 1:03:28–1:03:31When scripture commands?
783. 1:03:31–1:03:34One friend you have not yet pulled, you may honor.
784. 1:03:34–1:03:36Scripture does not merely describe, it commands.
785. 1:03:36–1:03:41Maxache, the self should be known not Maxache, what is a command, if not simply an action,
786. 1:03:41–1:03:46or a desire, already present in the listener without need of any speaker behind it.
787. 1:03:46–1:03:48Neither will serve.
788. 1:03:48–1:03:56Action for backslash know the self backslash command nothing that moves through space at all and any command reduced to mere action
789. 1:03:56–1:04:02Collapses into every ordinary sentence describing a person walking to market not desire either
790. 1:04:03–1:04:07For the very desire to act arises only from cognizing the command backslash
791. 1:04:07–1:04:14S meaning make desire the meaning of the command and desire becomes both cause and effect of itself
792. 1:04:14–1:04:20self, circular and empty. What a command actually conveys is a speaker backslash,
793. 1:04:20–1:04:25as intentioned at the listener act, and an intention requires, by its very grammar, a
794. 1:04:25–1:04:30Nintendo. Backslash, you should do this backslash, is meaningless without someone,
795. 1:04:30–1:04:36whose desire it expresses concerning you. Every injunction in scripture, examined honestly
796. 1:04:36–1:04:41down to its grammar, points back to a speaker standing behind the verb.
797. 1:04:41–1:04:46C-nate, the eight proof, what counts the atoms?
798. 1:04:46–1:04:52And last, the strangest and, to my mind, the most delicate of the eight.
799. 1:04:52–1:05:00A pair of atoms has a certain magnitude, a triad, a magnitude far greater, too great to be explained by atomic size alone,
800. 1:05:00–1:05:09for if mere multiplication of atoms explained it, two atoms together should already show that same gross size, and they plainly do not.
801. 1:05:09–1:05:19something beyond bare abrogation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly.
802. 1:05:19–1:05:25Tunis is not a property lying passively in the pair, it arises through an act of enumeration.
803. 1:05:25–1:05:29And atoms are, by their very nature, invisible to every one of us.
804. 1:05:29–1:05:38Whose enumeration, then, gives the diadids to nests, if no phyite creature has ever counted a single atom in its life.
805. 1:05:38–1:05:40Only a omniscient counter.
806. 1:05:40–1:05:42Only a omniscient counter.
807. 1:05:42–1:06:04Eight proofs, friend, the world as effect, the atoms backslash, first motion, its sustaining, its destruction, the first teaching of every word we speak, the validity of an ancient trust, scripture backslash, its own testimony to its source, and our own very self, present in what a muskled ever count alone.
808. 1:06:04–1:06:08I do not claim any single one of these, standing by itself.
809. 1:06:08–1:06:13Could not be picked at by a patient enough opponent across another whole evening,
810. 1:06:13–1:06:17you have shown me tonight exactly how patient this hall can be.
811. 1:06:17–1:06:24I claim only that eight independent lines, converging on the same conclusion from eight different directions
812. 1:06:24–1:06:28no one of them borrowed from the others, are not eight coincidences.
813. 1:06:28–1:06:33That is what a bouquet is, in the end, not one unbreakable flower,
814. 1:06:33–1:06:40But many gathered together, so that even if one pedal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole in your hand.
815. 1:06:41–1:06:45See line, direct nerring, beyond argument.
816. 1:06:46–1:06:55And there's there truly no way to know him except by chains of reasoning, you dea-na, it proofs, each requiring a haul like this one, and an evening like this one to walk through.
817. 1:06:55–1:06:58Reasoning is not the only door.
818. 1:06:58–1:07:04Yagin's report-direct inner knowing of him, the way a dream sometimes shows a mind-things-no-external
819. 1:07:04–1:07:08sense supplied it, not every dream is mere memory replayed.
820. 1:07:08–1:07:11Some carry the texture of genuine experience.
821. 1:07:11–1:07:16Through discipline, through the stealing of ordinary restlessness, that same kind of
822. 1:07:16–1:07:21unmediated knowing is said to be possible for God as it is, in smaller measure, for
823. 1:07:21–1:07:23the vividness of a true dream.
824. 1:07:23–1:07:27I have not asked this hall to take that on-face tonight.
825. 1:07:27–1:07:30I have only walked to, proof by proof,
826. 1:07:30–1:07:35toward the point where faith and reason arrive at the same door from different roads.
827. 1:07:36–1:07:39Scene 10. Final Prayer of the Hole Bukke.
828. 1:07:40–1:07:43Udayana turns, for the last time in this drama,
829. 1:07:43–1:07:46toward the unseen image at the head of the hall.
830. 1:07:46–1:07:51The Hole Assembly, Objector, Mimonsaka, Kanaka,
831. 1:07:51–1:07:58Samkhiya, Boda, Vaishishika, Atheist, falls quiet around him.buckslash.
832. 1:07:58–1:08:05If even this, eight proofs, offered honestly, tested honestly, cannot move a mind, that
833. 1:08:05–1:08:09mind is stone, and no bouquet of arguments will soften stone.
834. 1:08:09–1:08:12So I do not pray for victory here.
835. 1:08:12–1:08:13I pray instead.
836. 1:08:13–1:08:19May this bouquet of reasoning perfume both ostrals equally, may it satisfy the theist,
837. 1:08:19–1:08:24who came already believing, and, in its own time, reach even the atheist, who came to
838. 1:08:24–1:08:26break it.
839. 1:08:26–1:08:31And if it cannot do even that much, then let it rest simply as an offering, gathered
840. 1:08:31–1:08:37honestly, kept fresh, laid without expectation at the feet of the Lord of Teachers, who
841. 1:08:37–1:08:42alone knows whether the mind that hears it tonight will find its way home sooner,
842. 1:08:42–1:08:48or only later, or by some other road than this hall backslash s, entirely.
843. 1:08:48–1:08:55stillness. Then, one by one, unhurried, the assembly rises. The atheist is the last to
844. 1:08:55–1:09:02stand. The proscenium curtain, crimson and gold, the same curtain that rose on the first
845. 1:09:02–1:09:09bouquet, begins its final, slow descent over the lamplit subar dot buck slash. Five bouquets,
846. 1:09:09–1:09:16eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone out all evening. The debate ends here. Where
847. 1:09:16–1:09:23the return settled in, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries it out the door.
848. 1:09:23–1:09:26End of Act 5, end of the play.

Plain text

Setting an assembler hall sabah in Mithila, open-pillared, a lamp burning. Scholars of many schools have gathered, as was the custom, to test one proposition against all comers. Act 1. The First Bukke of Flowers. Of arguments concerning the cause of the world. Scene 1 Invocation Stage curtain rises on the Lamplit Sabah. Udayana stands, folds his hands toward an unseen image, and speaks first not to the assembly but as an offering dot-b-slash. Before argument and offering understand these words in two senses at once, as one speaks of flowers and in the same breath of doctrine. Udayana as in vocation half-jump, a beat then more plainly to the hall, definition of the subject of inquiry. I mean then to make plain the nature of that lord that transcend itself, thus worship the learned caller rode to heaven and to freedom. Seen to, why inquire at all? The assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement dot bishlash. Udayana, why inquire? The Vedda already sings of him. tradition in this hall already has its god under a different name. What doubt remains to open an inquiry? None, and that is exactly my point friend, and exactly my problem. Look at this assembly. The follower of the Upanishads calls him pure consciousness. Kekeler backslash as people call him eternal and conscious. But not the maker. Penedriely backslash as joggins call him a self untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach. The passiporters call him free even of the rules that bind us. Shavers call him chiever, Beishnarers, Vishnu, the tellers of Purirana, call in grand sire of all. The ritualist calls him the one to whom the oblation is poured. The Digambarer calls him one free to body and a vignance. The Mimamsarkar calls the deities of the mantras themselves, God. Even you, Karabhavarkar, have some word for what ordinary people mean by backslash god dot bixlash. A word, not a belief. Even a word is data, friend. My point stands, everyone in this hall already agrees that something is meant by backslush guide backslush, and disagrees completely on what, that is not the ground for silence, that is the very ground that demands inquiry. We have heard enough from Scripture, it is time, now to reason. The Veddo itself says, first hear, then reflect, and the elders add, through hearing, Through reasoning, through the quiet practice of meditation, a soul comes at last to seal itself truly. So reflection begins. Scene 3. Five Doubts Named Let me be honest about what stands against me before I offer a single proof. Five doubts, and I will take them one by one across this bouquet. One, there is no unseen supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all. Two, even without such a cause, plain human striving is enough to explain ritual and its fruits. 3. There is positive evidence that God does not exist. 4. Even if some proof of God is offered, that very proof will turn out invalid. 5. No. Authoritative proof of God exists at all. Valid or not. Good. Save them plainly. That is fair debate. Take the first, then. Scene 4. Against. Back. Slash. No. Unseen cause. Back. Slash. Look at how differently people act. Two men. Same circumstance. Choose opposite paths. One turns to ritual. one to indulgence, one to renunciation. That difference in tendency has causes, and the chain of those causes has no first link we can point to. And whatever a man reaps, he reaps in his own person, not another backslash s. So something unseen must connect this life backslash s action to a fruit received beyond it. This world, thick with every kind of suffering unequally dealt out, cannot be uncaused. An uncaused thing either exists always or never. It does not arise here, cease there, on no schedule at all. Yet, plainly, this world of ours does arise and cease on a schedule none of us set, therefore some cause beyond the scene. Unless the effects simply arose by accident, no cause needed at all. Seeing five, backslash by accident, backslash examined and refuted. Say what you mean by backslash, accident, backslash, and I will show you collapses into one of four things. No cause at all. Self-production. Production from nothing or merely a fact about the thing backslush as own nature. None of the four survives. Every effect that comes to be has a clear earlier limit. The moment before which it was not, and a clear later limit, the moment after which it will not be. As it is, nothing marks that limit at that moment, except a cause acting then. But suppose the moment itself needs no further explanation. A thing simply has the property of beginning to exist on this day rather than another the way space simply has the property of being eternal. Our property is shared by everything explains nothing about why this thing on this day. If backslash beginning to exist whenever it does backslash were just each thing backslash as spare nature with no cause behind it. The very question backslash why then and not really your backslash would return endlessly and answer nothing. No, production needs a producer. Chance is not an answer. It is the question wearing in disguise. Mean 6 on cause, general and particular. Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say fire, arises from such different means, dry grass rubbed, wood churned, sunlight gathered through a lens. If cause determines effect strictly, how does one effect come from three, unlike origins? Because causal power is known through observed correlation in each distinct context, not proclaimed once for all context at once, grinding, churning, focusing, three different causal complexes, each independently verified to yield fire under its own conditions. Nothing in that variety damages the rule that in effect requires a sufficient cause. It only shows that backslash, sufficient cause backslash can be realized more than one way. The rule survives. Only your picture of it was too narrow. Assembly a murmur of a sin. Scene 7 and scene merit as the cause of the world backslash s diversity. granola. Why must have unseen merit and demerit, adrecia, be the missing cause? Why not simply say ordinary, visible, auxiliary causes strung together to explain all the diversity we see? Because of visible chains of cause alum explained everything, no one would trouble to perform a single unrewarded ritual, and yet people do expecting nothing here only hereafter. Ask why they persist, not for pleasure. The unbeliever seeks pleasure more directly and skips the ritual, not for reputation alone that fails to explain private devotion no one sees, not because elders deceive the young, for the elders themselves keep the observance, and a deceiver does not usually deceive himself first. Some cunning founder inventing it all for his own gain, then the alone should have grown rich and free, giving nothing away, yet the pattern runs the other direction entirely the sincere giveaway what they have. No way exhaustive account without an unseen throat survives a scrutiny. unseen, some adrester must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that fruit. Scene 8 Potency as an independent reality causality of absence. narrator reads the section title, Udayana and the object to work through a longer technical passage condensed here to its spine-dopk slash. Even so must this backslash potency backslash you speak of be some separate reality over and above the visible substances that act could could not mere absence of an obstruction be doing the causal work with nothing further needed. Absence can remove a hindrance, it cannot, by itself, produce a positive effect to make bricks into a house you need not only the absence of the builder-backslush s-laziness, but the mason-backslush s-hand, ritual likewise, does not merely clear a path. It lays down something, a residual potency in the agent, that ripens later into a frout that residue Israel, though unseen, its reality is inferred exactly as we infer fire from smoke, by its necessary connection with an effect that has no other adequate explanation. This is the same style of reasoning that will, in time, tarry us all the way to God and inference from effect to a cause required by the effect. Nothing mystical, nothing merely asserted. Scene 9 Whom does ritual consecrate? Exposition of Samkia and its Critique the sound-care teacher rises dot pxlash. Let me offer our school backslash s account. Since it touches your very question, we hold that Prakriti, primordinal nature, unconscious but active woven of the three gooners, undertakes all transformation of the world unaided for the sake of Pyrrasha backslash s liberation. no further cause. Unseen merit or God is required. Prakriti alone suffices as the ground of ritual backslash s power and the world backslash s unfolding. In elegant system, teacher and I will rant it much, but consider Prakriti as you describe her as one undifferentiated at the route, acting always by the same essential nature, a single uniform cause, left to itself cannot by itself explain the sequence of unlike effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn, as she produces successively. Something must account for the order of that succession, and that something is exactly the kind of unseen, individuating cause I am arguing for. Grant me that much. We are no longer very far apart. You have simply not yet given it the name I give it. We will not settle that today, but I concede the difficulty is real. In ten, the Carvaka is answered. The Carvaka steps forward in patient dot px slash. Enough delicacy. There is no unseen anything. What is not seen, touched, or reasoned from direct perception is simply not there to reason about. Ritual is habit. The next world is a story told to keep the poor obedient. Then answer me plainly. Carvaka, why do sincere people perform rites that cost them, that bring them no worldly return that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation, still they persist, quietly, without display. You have called it habit, but habit needs a first cause too, and every account you offer – pleasure, custom, deception, a founder backflush s-cunning – collapses the moment it is tested, as I have already shown this assembly. What is not directly seen is not thereby proven false. It is simply what must be established by inference, which is the very tool you yourself used to work from smoke to fire, though you have never seen the two joined at the source. Influence, I permit. Faith, I do not. Then let us continue by inference alone. That is all I have asked of anyone in this hall. Scene 11, the border and the doctrine of Momenturinus. The border steps forward, Dotpa slash. Udea, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who ritually acts today and reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit. Nothing endures. Every existent is momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears. What you call backslash, the same person backslash tomorrow, is only a causal series, each moment new. Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was owned by a moment that no longer exists at the time of rebelling? If nothing endures, even an instant longer than its arising, the doer of the deed, and the receiver of the fruited ore, by your own account, too different, unconnected momentary existence, and moral responsibility itself desolves. Consider it too, how ordinary recognition works, I see a jar today, and know it as the same jar I saw yesterday, not a new jar resembling the old, if that recognition of identity were always delusion, no cognition of difference between two moments could stand as reliable either, since both rest on the same faculty of comparing and cross-tying. Deny persistence, rout, and branch, and you cannot even trust the doubt you have just raised against me for even raising the doubt requires that the one who doubted a moment ago and the one who now speaks are the same continuing self. We say the continuity is causal, not substantial. An ecological series sufficiently unified to carry karmic fraud across time is, in every respect that matters, here, what I mean by an enduring self. We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, month, but something persists. On that, this bouquet cannot yield. Scene 12, persistence and causality reconciled, deal objection on the eternal self. Grant persistence then. Scylph, if an object backsash, s very nature is to be a cause, must it not cause its effect always everywhere, the moment it exists, the way blue is always blue. Yet an eternal, all-pervading self is not seen to produce pleasure and pain at every moment. How then can causality and an eternal self be reconciled at all? Because causality is not backslush any object automatically produces any effect it is capable of, always dot backslash it is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect, ascertained sometimes by watching agreement and difference, where that gales as with something eternal and everywhere present which cannot be absent anywhere to test the backslush difference backslash side, ascertained instead through a reason that establishes the causal relation directly. The self produces pleasure and pain only in conjunction with its proper auxiliary conditions, mind, body, the ripening of that same unseen potency we spoke of earlier. Not everything blue produces every blue thing backslash s affects at all times either a particular cause, with its particular auxiliaries present, produces its particular effect that is simply what causality means, once stated carefully, and ordinary experience confirms it at every turn. CONTRUDING PRAYER Scene 13. CONTRUDING PRAYER OF THE FIRST BOUKEI Udayana turns again toward the unseen image, the hall-quiet's dot-biss-slash. That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals, each soul its portion, call it mayer, since the mind cannot grasp at all, call it prayer-creedy, since all creation springs from it. Avalabdavidir, since knowledge loam disalls it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wait devotion in my heart, stand as witness visibly to what I offer here." Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sabbat, lamp still burning. As assembly murmurs, some persuaded, some still folding their arms. The debate visibly unfinished, waiting for the second bouquet dot biss slash. Act 2 The Second Bukkeye of Flowers of Arguments Concerning Valid Cognition, The Eternity of the Veda and the Possibility of a New Creation. New Voice Joining this Act, the Mimum Saka, a Vedic ritualist scholar Curtis Button yielding who holds that the Veda is awfulous and eternal and that cognition proves its own truth without external help. one why an Omniscient being is still needed. Curtain rises again on the same sabbath later in the debate. Udayana stands where he left off dot-b-slash. We have established, across the first bouquet, that an unseen destiny governs the fruit of every act, but destiny itself must have some cause, and no creature among us can perceive that cause directly. No one acts purposefully toward what lies wholly beyond cognition, So some extraordinary omniscient being must exist, able to hand down to us true knowledge that is not causally linked, so that we may act rightly at all. Why reach for an omnipotent God? You Deanna, when the beginningless and broken chain of Vedic tradition already carries that knowledge to us, or if you distrust an awful asbedda, the sage Kapila and others attain omniscience through yoga and discipline alone, neither requires your God. This valid cognition depends on causes outside itself and the world is not on any account unbroken. It dissolves periodically entirely. Scene 2 is validity known from within or from outside. Before you reach for God, settle a smaller question first. One might say, and you'll have long disputed. When a cognition arises, is its truth known automatically, and the very arising of it? I say yes. To cognize something at all simply is to take it as true. What later proves false was, on inspection, never truly a cognition. Then explained out, Mimamsaka. If validity announced itself the instant a cognition arose, no cognition could ever be doubted. Yet we doubt constantly the moment a cognition dos and backslash, to resemble others already confirmed true. Validity, like invalidity, is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing, a further mark, a further inference, a test in successful action. But your box-lush, external test box-lush invites its own regress. If a second cognition is needed to certify the first, a third is needed to certify the second, and so on without end. Not so, because most of the time, certifying validity is simply unnecessary. There is neither doubt nor a reason for doubt. Belief in an object arises, and we act on it without any separate act of certification. Only where doubt genuinely arises does the further inference come in, and there, it terminates, because the redress you fear threatens your backslash, intrinsic validity backslash doctrine exactly as much as mine. You too must postulate that a cognition backslash, S backslash, being known backslash, is itself validly postulated, prove that, and you are inferring all over again. Affair hit. Consider the thirsty man, who drinks the moment he sees water. You backslash D. Say he directly perceives water backslash S. Power to quench thirst, since he acts without hesitation. He does not. That power is inferred, instantly and unconsciously, from past experience. The way desire itself is born from a swift, silent inference that a certain action gets a certain result. Swiftness is not same as an extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remained extrinsic. Scene 3, Dream, Waking, and Warbuck Slash S2 Hands. Then tell me how any of us tells Waking from Dreaming at all, you be honest, if my My liberty is never simply given. I dream I am drowning in a pond, the terror is total, indistinguishable in the moment from any waking terror, until I wake and find no water anywhere. And the moment you wake, the two states stand in sharp, undeniable opposition, the dim memory of the dream against the vivid immediacy of waking. At contrast is itself the criterion. It does not need to be imported from anywhere else, because waking experience supplies its So standard against which the dream is measured and found wanting. The Western logician Ray Macharpa outstill. A philosopher, Moore, may call him, held up both his hands before a hall and said, Maxache, here is one hand, here is another. Therefore external objects are real not Maxache, his critics answered. If your merry eyes could be doubted, showing us your hands proves nothing. Let them out on. A bare logical possibility that evidence might someday surface against a fact is not the same as evidence that has surfaced. Push that skepticism to its root, and you land on the law of uncontradiction itself. Call it a tautology, if you like, empty of content, but even the skeptic must stand on it to say anything at all, including his doubt. I do not need certainty invulnerable to every conceivable future. I need what any reasonable inquiry needs. The balance of evidence, honestly weighed. And on that balance, Nia-Baxash's account of validity, known through Mark's external to bear cognition, confirmed by finally successful action, carries the greater weight. Illusion and error are undeniable facts of experience. If, as you Mimamsa could say, everything Cog-Eyes does thereby true, what, then, are illusion and error? You have no answer for that. Scene 4. Proofs that sound is not eternal. Grant me this much, then, and let me change ground. Even without your God, the Vedas need not be authored at all. The Vedas and the very sound it is made of may simply be eternal, requiring no faultless speaker and no author to answer for. There I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing. say, every day, backslash, that sound has stopped backslash, the drum was struck, and now it is silent. That is a direct cognition of sound backslash as destruction. Sound cannot have merely moved elsewhere, being formless, it cannot have been covered over, for covering belongs to things with shape. It has not merely grown too faint for us, for the same Excuse would prove that a shattered pot has not really broken, only become invisible. But the ear cannot perceive that absence directly at substratum, ether, cannot be perceived at all. The ear need not perceive ether to perceive the absence of sound in the ear, precisely as darkness is perceived as the absence of light, without anyone perceiving the invisible particles that would be its locus. And listen to the sound itself. Pitch rises, falls, loudens, softens, one and the same eternal thing cannot bear opposed qualities at once. What you call backslash, the same word, recognized again backslash, is a flame recognized again, new fuel, new light, each moment, called by one name out of habit. Production and destruction, not eternity, is what your own ear tells you, if you will trust it. The tradition will need to answer your dissuadlings, elsewhere. It will. For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken feather, is produced, and what is produced can be lost. Which returns us to the question, who restores it, each time the world dissolves, and forgets. Scene 5. How can a new creation even begin? Suppose I grant dissolution. during dissolution, on your own account, nothing moves, nothing acts, the sky itself stands empty and still. What, then, could possibly initiate a new creation out of absolute stillness? Consider deep sleep first, as a smaller case of the same puzzle. In dreamless sleep, the self-max slash S cognition, desire, pleasure, and pain all fall silent together, yet the body-max slash S breath continues, faint, and the self-wakes again damaged. So to that cosmic dissolution, an extremely subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements, to find a register as backslash, the world backslash, until its final stage marks the moment, and becomes the seed of NUCREATION. It is not that a day must always be preceded by another day of its own kind, the first day of the monsoon is preceded by the last day of summer, not by another rainy day. So to the first day of a new creation is preceded by dissolution, not by another day of an old world. And the first human beings, the first Brahmins, the first speakers of editor not all, no parent taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach. As the first scorpion rises from Ra and Dunn, not from a scorpion parent, and only later generations breed true, so the Supreme Lord may himself take the forms of Teacher and pupil at the world-back-slash-est on, gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet-back-slash-est hand toward a distant object, and in that gesture teach the very first convention of word and meaning. From that first instruction the whole chain, potter to potter, weaver to weaver, teacher to student, descends unbroken until the next dissolution breaks it again. Scene 6. The long decline, and why scripture needs restoring. And do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today as it once did. Look honestly at what has already frayed. Right's once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches how survive, if at all, through a single branch, imperfectly kept. Dharma once stood on four legs, austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, charity. Austerity fell, two legs remained. Knowledge fell. One leg, charity, bears the whole weight now, and even that leg is wounded. Then say plainly what you are building toward. That scripture is not self-sustaining. Its authority depends on the Veda, not on the general good conduct of virtuous people copying one another, For if virtuous conduct alone were sufficient to make an act obligatory, no scriptural injunction would be needed at all, and yet we all know rights that have lapsed entirely, with no living witness, that must one day be restored, not merely remembered. Restoration needs a knower, and faith in scripture merely recognizes truth, it cannot manufacture it, once the original cause is gone. Scene 7. Capilla is tested and found insufficient. Then let Capilla serve us that knower, a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved by compassion for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost. Test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend. Meditation may indeed be a means of knowing what is otherwise hidden, I do not deny it wholesale, but meditation does not automatically yield knowledge the instant it is practiced. It needs some other means to confirm what it has found. What confirms capilla-back-slash-s-meditation on compassion and on violence, whose fruits no one has ever seen. A coward meditates fruitfully on a snake only because he has met a snake before. No one has met the fruit of yoga directly in this life or between two lives, for the body that acts in this birth and the body that reaps the fruit in the next are not even the same body and without some experienced link joining the two, the connection cannot be verified at all. It has said some remember form of births. It is said, but not established. A teacher who falls asleep on a holiday night and resumes yesterday backslash SSS an aton proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two. And consider the very first promise at creation backslash S.T.O.N. By what memory could they have known their own lineage if no one had yet been born to remember it? No power of travel between worlds is proven either, that might have carried settlers in bearing a caste system readymade. It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, omnipotent being, who needs no body, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, and to multiply unproven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly. I will carry the question forward, Udayana. I do not yet carry your conclusion. That is exactly as the debate should stand, at the end of its second round. CNAID. Concluding prayer of the second bouquet. Udayana turns, once more toward the unseen image.buckslash. May my heart hold fast to shiver until life backslash, as last moment, he who, aided by the destinies of every being, Bills this astonishing world again and again and like a magician doing his own trick and makes it again Who's will run unopposed through the whole of the cosmos? Who is its final cause? On that lord alone, let my devotion rest unmoved Curtain falls slowly. A mimum soccer remains seated in thought as the lamp dims Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted. Oh no one yet concedes.buck slash Act 3. A third bouquet of flowers. Of arguments refuting every alleged proof that God does not exist. The atheist, nastica, joins the flawless act, not a school so much as a stance, whatever cannot be caught by some means of knowledge, he holds, cannot be real. The Mimamsarka, and the V.A.I.S.H.E.S.H.I.K.A. are precise. Categorial Logician Cousin Tanaya also speak dot-back slash. Scene 1, backslash, he is not seen, therefore he is not backslash. Curtain rises. The lamp is trimmed higher. This bouquet is the hall backslash. S most contested dot-back slash. You have spent 2 bouquets building to Watermaker on the world, you may honor. I will spend this one demolishing the foundation. If God existed, He ought to be knowable, as a cow-back-sash-shawn is knowable by its shape and color. He is not known. Therefore He does not exist, exactly as a hair-back-sash-shawn does not exist, precisely because, though its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one has ever perceived one. one. A clean argument, and cleanly wrong at its first step. Your inference works only where the object was already granted to be perceptible, the hairback slash ass horn fails the test of perception it was always eligible to sit. God was never claimed by any theist in this hall to be an object of ordinary perception at all. You cannot fault an unseen thing for failing a test it was never entered into. Then how is he known, if not by the The one method you out-exempt him from. My inference, which is precisely what these five bouquets exist to supply, save your strongest objection for the fifth, when the inferences themselves stand before you. For now I only clear the ground. Non-apprehension of a thing never claimed to be apprehensible proves a thing. Seen to, sleep, the self, and what non-apprehension cannot touch. your own self, then, as a test case, in dreamless sleep you do not apprehend your own self, yet you do not conclude, on waking, that you have ceased to exist. Why does the same silence, applied to God, not equally prove his absence? Because in sleep the causes that would produce self-cognition are simply not assembled, the mind has withdrawn from the senses, not because the self has vanished, but because the instrument of noticing it has gone quiet. The very fact you rely on that no one doubts their own continued existence through a dreamless eye is itself proof that unapprehension does not entail unexistence. You have refuted your own method with your own example. Then try this instead, a conscious being ought to show bodily activity as the sprouting seed shows the God of a box-ass hand. No divine activity is seen before a single sprout appears. No activity, no agent. A pot needs an embodied potter. The world does not thereby need an embodied maker of the identical kind. The self persists, unmoving, through sleep, through fainting, through the stillness of poison, or extreme cold, without any bodily sign at all. Different effects proceed from different kinds of causes, and there is no law-binding every maker to a visible hand. 3. The Carvaka backslash S wager and why it cannot be cached. The Carvaka steps in sharper than before dot backslash. Let me strip this down for the most racist vass. I do not even require backslash knowable but a known backslash as your loophole. My rule is simpler. What is not known in any sense does not exist. What is known exists. God is never known. Finished. Then finish it, Carfaka, and see where it leads you. On your rule, the moment you step outside your own house, you no longer perceive your wife, your children, your stored brain, by your own law, they must be judged destroyed the instant your eyes leave them. Do you believe that? Memory assures me they remain. Memory assures you have many destroyed things too. A childhood house long, since fallen, a friend long dead. The alone cannot certify present existence. The instant you leave on memory to save your family from your own rule, you have conceded exactly what I need. Non-apprehension does not prove non-existence. And consider that I itself, the very organ your backslash, seeing backslash, depends on is never itself seen, yet you do not doubt it exists. Your rule, followed honestly, destroys your own instrument of doubting. conduct does not need certainty. It runs on probability, general agreement, tested by use. Then where does probability lie on your account? If a thing is seen, you say it's existence is certain. If unseen, its absence is certain. You have left no middle ground for probability to stand on at all. You have described a doctrine with no room for the very mode of belief you say it rests on. for. Why inference itself survives the doubt? Rent inference some ground, then, if you insist. But how is that about it ever finally removed? Every absorbed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition we haven't backslash the thought to check. That threat never closes. It closes the moment you notice something you have already conceded. To doubt a future deviation, you must already be able to think about the future, and that very capacity inference extended from present time through hour, day, and season. You cannot use inference to attack inference without borrowing the very tool you are trying to disqualify. And practically, doubt ends where a counterfactual would trap the doubter in his own contradiction. The eye that cause and effect are reliably connected, and the very act of doubting, itself an effect, Could never have arisen in you at all. A reasonable mind does not chase every conceivable exception forever. It follows a reason, whose pervasion has been tested, and holds, and acts. Carry it forward, then. I will listen to the rest. Scene 5. Comparison. And the fifth UK Backslash S-Coming Test. Set aside. One more avenue, yo Diana, before you move on. Some old backslash, comparison backslash, cognition, pro-observed similarity, to be its own independent means of knowledge, distinct from perception and inference. If so, a difficulty for your follows, everything known resembles something else already known, but the god you describe as nothing else similar to many could comparison in proven absence by that very singularity? Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor unbeking, and no such third kind exists. Being and unbeing exhaust the field, then I won, and you have thereby affirmed it other. Similarity is simply a property of things that already are sorted under one or the other of those two categories. It needs no independent status, and therefore yields no independent weapon against a being who happens, by his nature, to be singular. Uniqueness is not a defect that argument can weaponize, it is simply a fact some subjects have and others don't. Scene 6. Verbal Testimony, and the dispute over an omniscient author. Then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole book is a close-bock to whether the VEDA needs an author at all. The Vesha Shaka treats an ordinary sentence like, Slash, As meaning as something inferred from the speaker Bach Slash, As intention, Testimony reduced to a kind of inference. My own school Bach Slash, As Prabhaka, A branch, Go further, Only the VEDA, Being authorless, Car in independent authority, An ordinary human sentence is trust, While the only one inference has certified the speaker reliable. Both positions ask testimony to do more work than it needs to. The moment you already know a word backslash s expressive power, the sentence backslash s meaning arrives with the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker backslash s reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all. A child, who does not yet know whether the Vedas as an author still understands the Vedic sentence perfectly well the moment he hears it. That alone shows understanding does not wait on settling authorship first. Testimony is its own means of knowledge, standing beside perception and inference, not smuggled inference wearing a disguise. Then can set up a sharper objection some raise directly against you, if an omniscient create a composed even human language itself at the world-backslash-s-dawn, teaching the first because word by word, how could such teaching ever get off the ground, with no shared word yet existing between teacher and pupil to teach with? As I have already shown you, in the second bouquet, through gesture before word, exactly as a puppeteer-backslash-s-cord makes a puppet-backslash-s hand-point at a distant thing, and the watching child in first meaning from the pointing before or any word is spoken at all. Instruction need not presuppose language completed. It can begin language, gesture first, word following. I do not ask you to accept this today. I only ask you to notice that the objection, however sharp it sounds, has already been met. Scene 7. Postulation and not apprehension, briefly weighed and found insufficient. The narrator reads the remaining section titles together, briskly, as Yuvea honor answers each in turn, the pace quickened here, a flurry rather than a dual dot backslash. Examination of Postulation as an Independent means of Knowledge. Examination of Not-Apprehension as an Independent means of Knowledge, and further examination of the same. One dependent of the Yuvea honor since you have answered comparison and testimony, Postulation, first, the inference forced on us when a known fact makes no sense otherwise. Does postulation not, in some case, force us to explain the world without God, and so crowd him out? Show me the fact that only makes sense without a maker, and I will answer it directly, but no one in this hall has yet produced one. Every alleged case of backslash, postulation against God backslash, turns out, an inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation backslash's name, and ordinary inference I have already answered at length. Then no apprehension, once more, in its fullest form, not merely Baxash, I have not seen him Baxash, which you answered in the first scene, but the deeper mimosa claim that no apprehension is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that its silence regarding God should count as positive evidence. Trace it carefully, and it collapses into perception after all, un-normal, un-impaired sense produces the determinate cognition backslash, no pot here backslash, by apprehending the place where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences in general. And the faculty that is, at bottom, perception in other guys inherits exactly the limit perception already had. It can report the absence only of what it was ever fit to detect in the first place. God was never within that fitness. The silence proves nothing new. It only restates. For the third time this UK, the very first answer I gave you. Then I have exhausted perception, inference, and apprehension, comparison, testimony, and postulation, and none of them has delivered me your absence. Not exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time. That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole UK. CNAIT. Closing Prayer of the Third Bukkei. Uday on the turns, one last time this act, toward the unseen image.buckslash. With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshiped across every tradition in this hall under a hundred names, whose quiet festival of bliss no rival joy equals, whose reality no perception can catch, can catch and discard no inference overturn no other means of knowledge unseat and on whom, in the end, every one of those means of knowledge itself depends to be trustworthy at all. Curtain falls. The atheist remains standing a moment longer than the rest of the assembly before he, too, sits dot back slash. Act 4. The Fourth Book of Flowers. of arguments concerning God as Noah, and the true nature of cognition. The shortest bouquet, and the most inward turning, having secured that God exists, and cannot be disproved, the whole now asks what it even means to call an unmoving, all knowing being a backslash, Noah backslash, at all. The mim-a-m-saka carries most of the argument This act dot back slash. Scene one. Can omniscience even be valid cognition? Curtain rises on the same lamplit subar, later still. Udiana looks tired in the good way, a debater deep into his case, not worn down by it dot back slash. One more difficulty, Udiana, and it strikes at the root of everything you have built. You call God omniscient. But valid cognition, by definition, must know something not already known, otherwise memory itself would count as a valid means of knowledge, which no one accepts. God-back-slash is knowledge in total, nothing is ever new to him. If nothing is ever new to him, on your own definition, nothing he knows can count as valid knowledge at all. And if his knowledge is not valid, he is no trust when they offer a benefit, including the matter you have spent rebuking defending. And the flaw is in that definition, not in God. Maxash, knowing what was not known before Maxash, cannot be what makes a cognition true. It is both too narrow and too wide. Too narrow. See the same jar twice, and the second seeing is every bit as true as the first, though nothing is new in it. Too wide, an illusion may present something never seen before, and still be false. Now will detract neither truth nor falsehood. What makes a cognition true is simply this, that it corresponds to how the thing actually is. By that measure, God-backslash-S-cognition, being total and never in error, is as true as any cognition could be, whether or not any of it is backslash-New-backslash-to-him. Then how do you distinguish a second tricy and not the same God from mere memory? We do not call memory a means of knowledge. Because memory depends entirely on a prior cognition to borrow its content from, it can authorize from a thing. A fresh seeing of the same jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through its own causes, not recalled from a store. And God-back-slash-sk's case is simpler still than either. His cognition of the whole universe is a single, self-identical act, dependent on no other cognition before it, needing no second glance at anything. Call it neither new nor old, it simply is entire, all at once. Scene 2. A bid for backslash, known as backslash, pre-attempts, pre-failure. Let me try a different door then. Surely cognition does something to its object, leaves some mark on it. We call this mark backslash, known as backslash. The property an object gains, simply by being known, of having been known. Without it, box-sh being produced box-sh in your own inference for a divine make-up becomes untrustworthy because an agent who leaves no trace on what he touches can hardly be said to know his own materials. Three ways to argue for such a mark and unsurvive testing. First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a result, and that result is known as a ten-arrow shot at the empty sky produces no result in the sky. Cognition may be like that arrow. Real motion, no mark left behind. Second, that we say backslash, the pot is known backslash, and this phrase itself proves some new property sits on the pot. But we equally say backslash, the pot was destroyed backslash, the pot that no longer exists to receive any property at all. Language describing a relation to an act does not, by itself, prove a real residue in the object. Third, that the very fact we can talk about cognition proves some perceptible trace it leaves. But the causes that let us talk about a cognition are the very same causes that produced the cognition in the first place. Nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk. Then on the sixth plane nothing but cognition box-ish, as only chuddleson box-ish, do you already explain on it's own? So, a cognition of a part is a cognition of a part by its own nature, exactly as an effort to lift a stone is an effort concerning that stone by its own nature, without either one depositing some third thing into what it touches. Scene 3. Is cognition itself something we perceive? Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself. How do you even know cognition has a card, if not through some form of cognition perceiving endlessly, one behind the next. Not endlessly, directly. The moment an indeterminate awareness of some external thing arises, the very fact of being a cognition is already faintly present alongside it to the mind. On the next moment, when a further cognition of that same object arises, the mind turns and knows the earlier cognition determinately. The way a first fire recognized in one backslash slash, S own kitchen let one recognize, by the same mark, a second fire glimpsed later on a distant hill through its smoke. Cognition is not itself perceived through some second, separate cognition standing outside it, the mind back slash, S direct relation to the self, in whom cognition in hears, is enough. Then answer the harder form of the question. On your school backslash, a zone account, a cognition last-sparely two or three moments before it perishes. If it is that brief, how does it last long enough both to reveal its object and to be caught, itself, by the mind looking back at it? And does that fleeting cognition, in its second moment, still grasp the very same object it grasped in the first, or has the object, in that instant, already changed? The same object, held across both moments, nothing stranger is required than granting that a cognition, once a reason, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction, to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind-backslash-as-next-plans. Chase the alternative you-backslash-regesturing-to-word, that each vanishing instant would need its zone vanishing backslash, known as backslash, to certify it, and that known as it's own further known as to certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one level up, the same infinite regress you were trying to rescue backslash, known as backslash, from in the first place. Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not multiplying it. Scene 4. What backslash, nor backslash, means, for a being, who does not act. everything so far. Still, every backslash means a knowledge backslash. We have ever named this defined by doing something. Did I act upon light? An inference acts through a middle term, a word acts through a speaker backslash, a deterrence. God, on your account, does none of this, no sense contact, no middle term, no speech act producing his knowledge. By what right? Then, do you still call him a knower at all, using a word built entirely out of agency? The ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word backslash, s meaning, not the whole of how it is actually used. We call a sense faculty a backslash, means of knowledge backslash, because it is causally involved in producing cognition. We call God a backslash, knower backslash, for a different, equally legitimate reason. Cognition simply resides in him, as a permanent feature of what he is, without needing to be produced by anything at all. A person can be a knower without, at this instant, being an agent of anything, knowing does not require doing. Nor need I claim his cognition is some fifth, undiscovered means of knowledge alongside perception, inference, testimony, and the rest. Broaden backslash, perception backslash, to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not perception through sense contact specifically, and God-back-slash-S knowing falls naturally under that wider sense, without forcing a new category into being. Scene 5 Does knowing every error make God-back-slash-S cognition erroneous? One last thrust, and then I yield the spookay. If God is omniscient, He knows every false belief every creature has ever held, every illusion, every mistaken inference, every dream. But then the objects of all error are, in some sense, present within them own cognition too. Does that not make this cognition itself short for an error? And if the knowledge already contains our mistakes, what use is then teaching and dispelling them? You have confused the error with the knowledge of the error, friend, and that confusion is exactly the kind of mistake God-back-slash-es cognition, unlike ours, never makes. An illusion is false. But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion, This is a false cognition. Backslash is not itself false. It is precisely the opposite. Clarity about falsehood, not participation in it. God knows every error and actually and it actually is an error and a cognition that correctly seems error and error in. By the very definition we settled at the start of this bouquet. True. Far from undermining his teaching, that is the only thing that makes his teaching worth anything at all. He does not merely hold our mistakes alongside his own truths, he sees them as mistakes, which is precisely what we, still caught inside them, cannot yet do for ourselves. I have carried forward a case of doubt into this hall, you the are are, and you have met everyone of them without once raising your voice. I do not yet call myself an sudden fool, but I no longer call myself your opponent either, only your most stubborn student. The debate has no better outcome than that, friend. Sit, and rest a moment. What remains is our defense any longer. Scene 6. Turning toward the 5th Bukkei. No concluding prayer is given for this Bukkei in the source text. The surviving pages move directly from the discussion of God-back-slash, as knowledge of error into the great positive proofs. The writer marks the turn, instead.back-slash. The doubt that no unseen cause exists, the doubt that ritual needs no God, the claim that God can be disproved outright, and, in this fourth and shortest bouquet, the question of what it even means to call so still a being a backslash, no dot backslash, every doubt raised against him has been met and turned. against him has been met and turned. One task remains, greater than all the rest, not merely to defend the Citadel, but to build it. Eight proofs, standing on their own feet, requiring no opponent backslash, s first move at all. That is the fifth bouquet, and the summit of this whole garden. Curtain falls softly, no music offending, only a pause, lamp trimmed writer for what follows. Act 5. The Fifth Book of Flowers. The Eight Proofs Establishing God-Bag-Slash-S-Existence. The Summit of the Debate. You day are no longer merely answers, he builds, proof after proof, each one standing on its own feet. The atheist, the Convaker, the Mimmsarker, The lamp here teacher, the border, and the VASHESHIK are all present in the hall, no longer opposing in turn, but listening as one assembly to a case finally being made in full dot book slash. Scene 1. Framing the gate. Curtain rises for the last time. The lamp burns steady. You day are not stand at the center of the hall, and for once no one interrupts him at the start dot book slash. book case, and I have done nothing yet, but clear drowned, answering doubt, refuting attack, defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending. Eight proofs stand before you, each sufficient on its own, needing no opponent backslash, as first move to exist at all. That the world is an effect. That the first motion in the atoms requires a mover. The world is sustained, but it is destroyed. At the very convention of word and craft required a first teacher. At the validity of the scriptural tradition demands a trustworthy source. That scripture itself testifies to its author. That even bare number, two-ness, three-ness, in things too small for any of us to count, bears the mark of accounting mind. Test each one as harshly as you have tested everything else I have said this evening. I ask only that you test them one at a time, on their own ground. Begin, then. I have not conceded easily tonight, and I will not begin now. Good. That is exactly how this should end. Scene 2. The first proof. The world is an effect. There, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a pot is produced. And a thing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, the world has a maker. Then that maker has a body, as every potter does. And if he has a body, he is not the bodiless god you have been building toward for Forbuu case. Press that objection and watch it fall through your own hands. Either you are claiming God has a body, in which case you have already granted he exists, and merely quibble about his shape, or you are claiming the world was made by an embodied being, and conclude from that alone that it was not made at all, which contradicts the very inference you are supposedly answering. A general cause need not share every feature of the particular causes we happen to have seen before. Fire is inferred from smoke, regardless of which fuel burned. A maker is inferred from a made world, regardless of whether that maker wears a body. Backshash, embodied backshash, was never the load-bearing part of my proof. You have argued against a word I did not need. Scene 3. The Second Proof. Motion in the Atoms. Consider the Atoms themselves, then, before they ever became a backshash, world backshash, at all. At creation backshash, its first instant, Atoms that had never before moved began to move, and combine. What in inert cannot move itself, a spade does not swing itself into the earth. Something conscious must impale it. Destiny alone might account for that first motion, without any conscious impeller at all. Destiny is one cause among several needed, teacher, not a cause that crowds out all the others. An inert thing, precisely because it is inert, needs a locus of consciousness to set it moving, exactly as a spade needs a hand. You may call the specific motion of a living body backslash different in kind backslash from the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define backslash bodily motion backslash any way you choose, and you will find the definition already assumes exactly what I am arguing. A special motion, produced by a conscious agent. You cannot use the very thing under dispute to disqualify the inference that establishes it. Scene 4, the third and fourth proofs, sustaining and destruction. The world, immense and heavy as it is, does not fall, as a bird-back-slash-esprit-weight does not fall, sustained by its own effort in flight. Something sustains the whole of it, moment to moment, the way effort sustains a living body. And when that same world is later destroyed, down to the smallest indivisible pair of atoms, destruction, too, requires an agent capable of it. Precisely as class is destroyed only by the tearing hand, not by nothing. Bestinia again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a destroyer. Bestinia is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause of knowledge is not every cause excluded. If Bestinia Loan explained the body-back-slash-ass-sustenance, effort itself would have no work left to do in keeping a living creature upright, which is plainly false, as any of us standing in this hall could tell you. Sustaining and destroying are, each one, effects. Effects need agents. The world-back-slash-ass-mastness is no exemption from a rule that governs every smaller thing we have ever watched rise and fall. Scene 5. The Fifth Proof. Who taught the first word? Consider something closer to home, Anathems. The very conventions by which any of us here understands the other. A Potter backslash S-Craft is learned from another Potter. A Weaver backslash S. From another Weaver. A Child learns the alphabet from a teacher who learned it from a teacher before. Trace that chain back far enough, and you reach a first link, a first podder with no podder to learn from, a first speaker with no language yet spoken to be taught in. Perhaps the chain simply has no forced link, beginningless, like the round of re-bought itself. The cycle of creation, and dissolution is beginningless, monk, I do not dispute that. But within any one cycle, at its own fresh dawn, there are no fallen or ordinary human beings yet available to have originated anything. Something must set the very first convention moving, in each new beginning, the way a puppeteer backsash s-jester, a chord-pulled, a hand-pointed, teaches a watching child the meaning of a word before any word has yet been spoken between them. That first teacher need not keep a body permanently. Scripture itself records a being who takes form again and again, precisely to renew what would otherwise be lost. Scene 6. The 6th and 7th Proofs. A trustworthy tradition. And scripture backslash. A sound word. Then let me meet you on my own ground, one final time. You say the Vedic tradition backslash is validity itself proves a sauce behind it. validity on my skill box.S teaching needs no external guarantee. It is simply what a properly caused cognition already is. And if every cognition backslash.S validity needed a further cognition to certify it, we would face the same redress that has followed us since the second bouquet. A redress I answered then and answer again now. A tradition this vast, this stable, held by learned people across every generation is not the kind of thing a single limited person invents from nothing. It requires, at its root, one being of the requisite excellence to originate it truly. And scripture does not merely imply such a source, it names one. In passage after passage, unprompted by any need for praise, the meta speaks of itself as issuing from a knowing mouth. Backslash, This made a issue for me in every cycle an U.X.Lash, a collection of sentences accepted on its own authority by every knowledgeable person who has ever studied it, resting on a thing beyond itself, is not the same thing as an ordinary human composition whose author merely goes unnamed. You have carried that thread across for a case to reach here. I recognize the shape of the argument, even if I have not yet fully laid down my own. is honest, and it is enough for tonight. Scene 7. An interlude. Who commands? When scripture commands? One friend you have not yet pulled, you may honor. Scripture does not merely describe, it commands. Maxache, the self should be known not Maxache, what is a command, if not simply an action, or a desire, already present in the listener without need of any speaker behind it. Neither will serve. Action for backslash know the self backslash command nothing that moves through space at all and any command reduced to mere action Collapses into every ordinary sentence describing a person walking to market not desire either For the very desire to act arises only from cognizing the command backslash S meaning make desire the meaning of the command and desire becomes both cause and effect of itself self, circular and empty. What a command actually conveys is a speaker backslash, as intentioned at the listener act, and an intention requires, by its very grammar, a Nintendo. Backslash, you should do this backslash, is meaningless without someone, whose desire it expresses concerning you. Every injunction in scripture, examined honestly down to its grammar, points back to a speaker standing behind the verb. C-nate, the eight proof, what counts the atoms? And last, the strangest and, to my mind, the most delicate of the eight. A pair of atoms has a certain magnitude, a triad, a magnitude far greater, too great to be explained by atomic size alone, for if mere multiplication of atoms explained it, two atoms together should already show that same gross size, and they plainly do not. something beyond bare abrogation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly. Tunis is not a property lying passively in the pair, it arises through an act of enumeration. And atoms are, by their very nature, invisible to every one of us. Whose enumeration, then, gives the diadids to nests, if no phyite creature has ever counted a single atom in its life. Only a omniscient counter. Only a omniscient counter. Eight proofs, friend, the world as effect, the atoms backslash, first motion, its sustaining, its destruction, the first teaching of every word we speak, the validity of an ancient trust, scripture backslash, its own testimony to its source, and our own very self, present in what a muskled ever count alone. I do not claim any single one of these, standing by itself. Could not be picked at by a patient enough opponent across another whole evening, you have shown me tonight exactly how patient this hall can be. I claim only that eight independent lines, converging on the same conclusion from eight different directions no one of them borrowed from the others, are not eight coincidences. That is what a bouquet is, in the end, not one unbreakable flower, But many gathered together, so that even if one pedal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole in your hand. See line, direct nerring, beyond argument. And there's there truly no way to know him except by chains of reasoning, you dea-na, it proofs, each requiring a haul like this one, and an evening like this one to walk through. Reasoning is not the only door. Yagin's report-direct inner knowing of him, the way a dream sometimes shows a mind-things-no-external sense supplied it, not every dream is mere memory replayed. Some carry the texture of genuine experience. Through discipline, through the stealing of ordinary restlessness, that same kind of unmediated knowing is said to be possible for God as it is, in smaller measure, for the vividness of a true dream. I have not asked this hall to take that on-face tonight. I have only walked to, proof by proof, toward the point where faith and reason arrive at the same door from different roads. Scene 10. Final Prayer of the Hole Bukke. Udayana turns, for the last time in this drama, toward the unseen image at the head of the hall. The Hole Assembly, Objector, Mimonsaka, Kanaka, Samkhiya, Boda, Vaishishika, Atheist, falls quiet around him.buckslash. If even this, eight proofs, offered honestly, tested honestly, cannot move a mind, that mind is stone, and no bouquet of arguments will soften stone. So I do not pray for victory here. I pray instead. May this bouquet of reasoning perfume both ostrals equally, may it satisfy the theist, who came already believing, and, in its own time, reach even the atheist, who came to break it. And if it cannot do even that much, then let it rest simply as an offering, gathered honestly, kept fresh, laid without expectation at the feet of the Lord of Teachers, who alone knows whether the mind that hears it tonight will find its way home sooner, or only later, or by some other road than this hall backslash s, entirely. stillness. Then, one by one, unhurried, the assembly rises. The atheist is the last to stand. The proscenium curtain, crimson and gold, the same curtain that rose on the first bouquet, begins its final, slow descent over the lamplit subar dot buck slash. Five bouquets, eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone out all evening. The debate ends here. Where the return settled in, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries it out the door. End of Act 5, end of the play.

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