MACHINE ASR ACCESSIBILITY AID

Bhamati_English_Animated.mp4

Not an editorially verified transcript. This text was generated automatically from the preserved recording and may contain recognition, language-detection, spelling, segmentation or name errors. Consult the source recording for authoritative content.

Collection: Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11
Status: asr-draft
Human verified: No
Editorial review: not-reviewed
ASR model: small
Detected language: en (0.985056)
Duration: 20:42
Source: Open preserved recording

Timestamped machine output

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

Plain text

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

← Transcript index