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Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11

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1. 0:00–0:03नाटकुसम्जाली, भुखे अव रेजन।
2. 0:03–0:09अव फिलिसोफिक देबेट प्ले, ड्रमताइजद from उदायना कर्याजद नाट्याखुसुम्जाली
3. 0:09–0:16Tonight's assembly, Nareta, Udayakarya, Udayana, the Abjecta, Prabhupakin, the Skyar Teacher,
4. 0:16–0:23the Kavaka, the Bauda, Buddhist Mung, Assembly, Collective, Unnamed.
5. 0:23–0:28Act 1 The First Bikkei of Flowers
6. 0:28–0:32Scene 1 Invocation
7. 0:32–0:35Reading the frame, before argument, an offering.
8. 0:35–0:43these words in two senses at once, as one speaks of flowers, and, in the same breath, of doctrine.
9. 0:43–0:49As invocation, half-chant, may this bouquet, gathered honestly, kept fresh, never crushed
10. 0:49–0:54to wilting though the hand presses hard upon it, be laid at the two feet of the Lord,
11. 0:54–0:59and may my mind, in that offering, know a joy no grief can follow.
12. 0:59–1:04A beat, then more plainly, to the whole.
13. 1:04–1:07of the subject of inquiry.
14. 1:07–1:12I mean, then, to make plain the nature of that Lord, that transcendent self, whose worship
15. 1:12–1:16the learned call the road to heaven and to freedom.
16. 1:16–1:20Seem to, why inquire at all?
17. 1:20–1:24The assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement.
18. 1:24–1:26Udayana.
19. 1:26–1:28Why inquire?
20. 1:28–1:31The Veda already sings of him.
21. 1:31–1:35Every tradition in this hall already has its God under a different name, what doubt remains
22. 1:35–1:37to open an inquiry.
23. 1:37–1:44None, and that is exactly my point, friend, and exactly my problem.
24. 1:44–1:47Gesturing around the hall, look at this assembly.
25. 1:47–1:51The follower of the Upaniads calls him pure consciousness.
26. 1:51–1:56Kapila's people call him eternal and conscious, but not the maker.
27. 1:56–2:02Patanjali's yogans call him a self-untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach.
28. 2:02–2:07The Pasapadas call him free even of the rules that bind us.
29. 2:07–2:14Sivas call him Shiva, Vyavas, Vyu, the tellers of Pura call him Grandsire of all.
30. 2:14–2:18The ritualist calls him the one to whom the ablation is poured.
31. 2:18–2:23The Dhegambara calls him one freed of body and of ignorance.
32. 2:23–2:27Mtsaka calls the deities of the mantras themselves God.
33. 2:27–2:33To see a with Mekran Arvya with Mekran Ka, not unkindly, even you, Kaurvaka, have some
34. 2:33–2:37word for what ordinary people mean by God.
35. 2:37–2:41Dry, a word not a belief.
36. 2:41–2:44Even a word is data, friend.
37. 2:44–2:49My point stands, everyone in this hall already agrees that something is meant by God, and
38. 2:49–2:52disagrees completely on what.
39. 2:52–2:55That is not the ground for silence.
40. 2:55–2:59That is the very ground that demands inquiry.
41. 2:59–3:01We have heard enough from scripture.
42. 3:01–3:04It is time now to reason.
43. 3:04–3:08The Veda itself says, first hear, then reflect.
44. 3:08–3:13And the elders add, through hearing, through reasoning, through the quiet practice of meditation,
45. 3:13–3:17a soul comes at last to see itself truly.
46. 3:17–3:20So, reflection begins.
47. 3:20–3:253. 5 Doubts Named. Let me be honest about what stands against
48. 3:25–3:31me before I offer a single proof. 5 Doubts, and I will take them one by one across this
49. 3:31–3:36bouquet. Counting on fingers, 1. There is no unseen,
50. 3:36–3:42supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all. 2. Even without such a cause,
51. 3:42–3:46plain human striving is enough to explain ritual and its fruit.
52. 3:46–3:503. There is positive evidence that God does not exist.
53. 3:50–3:55For even if some proof of God is offered, that very proof will turn out invalid.
54. 3:55–4:005. No authoritative proof of God exists at all, valid or not.
55. 4:00–4:07Good, say them plainly, that is fair debate. Take the first, then.
56. 4:07–4:11Scene 4. Against, no unseen cause.
57. 4:11–4:15Look at how differently people act.
58. 4:15–4:22Two men, same circumstance, choose opposite paths, one turns to ritual, one to indulgence,
59. 4:22–4:24one to renunciation.
60. 4:24–4:29That difference in tendency has causes, and the chain of those causes has no first link
61. 4:29–4:31we can point to.
62. 4:31–4:36And whatever a man reaps, he reaps in his own person, not in others.
63. 4:36–4:41So something unseen must connect this life's action to a fruit received beyond it.
64. 4:41–4:48This world, thick with every kind of suffering unequally dealt out, cannot be uncaused.
65. 4:48–4:53An uncaused thing either exists always or never, it does not arise here, cease there,
66. 4:53–4:56on no schedule at all.
67. 4:56–5:01Yet plainly this world of ours does arise and cease on a schedule none of us set.
68. 5:01–5:05Therefore, some cause beyond the scene.
69. 5:05–5:10Once the effect simply arose by accident, no cause needed at all.
70. 5:10–5:13Scene 5, by accident?
71. 5:13–5:16Examined and refuted.
72. 5:16–5:21Say what you mean by accident, and I will show you it collapses into one of four things,
73. 5:21–5:26no cause at all, self-production, production from nothing, or merely a fact about the
74. 5:26–5:28thing's own nature.
75. 5:28–5:31None of the four survives.
76. 5:31–5:35Every effect that comes to be has a clear earlier limit, the moment before which it was
77. 5:35–5:41not, and a clear later limit, the moment after which it will not be, as it is.
78. 5:41–5:46Nothing marks that limit, at that moment, except a cause acting then.
79. 5:46–5:51But suppose the moment itself needs no further explanation, a thing simply has the property
80. 5:51–5:55of beginning to exist on this day rather than another, the way space simply has the
81. 5:55–5:58property of being eternal.
82. 5:58–6:03A property shared by everything explains nothing about why this thing on this day.
83. 6:03–6:08If beginning to exist whenever it does, were just each things bare nature with no cause
84. 6:08–6:14behind it, the very question, why then and not earlier, would return endlessly and answer
85. 6:14–6:15nothing.
86. 6:15–6:19No, production needs a producer.
87. 6:19–6:24Chance is not an answer, it is the question wearing a disguise.
88. 6:24–6:32Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say, fire arises from such different means, dry
89. 6:32–6:37grass rubbed, which earned, sunlight gathered through a lens.
90. 6:37–6:43If cause determines effect strictly, how does one effect come from three unlike origins?
91. 6:43–6:48Because causal power is known through observed correlation in each distinct context, not
92. 6:48–6:51proclaimed once for all contexts at once.
93. 6:51–7:00Grinding, churning, focusing, three different causal complexes, each independently verified to yield fire under its own conditions.
94. 7:01–7:10Nothing in that variety damages the rule that an effect requires a sufficient cause, it only shows that sufficient cause can be realized more than one way.
95. 7:11–7:15The rule survives, only your picture of it was too narrow.
96. 7:16–7:17A murmur of ascent.
97. 7:17–7:237. Unseen merit as the cause of the world's diversity.
98. 7:23–7:29Grant all that. Why must the unseen merit and demerit, adah, be the missing cause?
99. 7:29–7:37Why not simply say, ordinary, visible auxiliary causes, strung together, explain all the diversity we see?
100. 7:37–7:43Because if visible chains of cause alone explained everything, no one would trouble to perform
101. 7:43–7:50a single unrewarded ritual, and yet people do, expecting nothing here, only hereafter.
102. 7:50–7:52Ask why they persist.
103. 7:52–7:58Not for pleasure, the unbeliever seeks pleasure more directly and skips the ritual.
104. 7:58–8:04Not for reputation alone, that fails to explain private devotion no one sees.
105. 8:04–8:09Not because elders deceive the young, for the elders themselves keep the observance,
106. 8:09–8:13and a deceiver does not usually deceive himself first.
107. 8:13–8:17Some cunning founder, inventing it all for his own gain.
108. 8:17–8:22Then he alone should have grown rich and free, giving nothing away, yet the pattern runs the
109. 8:22–8:27other direction entirely, the sincere giveaway what they have.
110. 8:27–8:32No exhaustive account without an unseen fruit survived scrutiny.
111. 8:32–8:39Being unseen, Samadha, must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that fruit.
112. 8:39–8:45Scene 8. Potency as an independent reality, causality of absence.
113. 8:45–8:50Even so, must this potency you speak of be some separate reality, over and above the
114. 8:50–8:52visible substances that act?
115. 8:52–8:57Could not mere absence of an obstruction be doing the causal work, with nothing further
116. 8:57–8:59needed?
117. 8:59–9:05can remove a hindrance, it cannot, by itself, produce a positive effect.
118. 9:05–9:09To make bricks into a house you need not only the absence of the builder's laziness but
119. 9:09–9:11the mason's hand.
120. 9:11–9:18Ritual, likewise, does not merely clear a path, it lays down something, a residual potency
121. 9:18–9:22in the agent, that ripens later into fruit.
122. 9:22–9:28That residue is real, though unseen, its reality is inferred, exactly as we infer fire from
123. 9:28–9:34smoke, by its necessary connection with an effect that has no other adequate explanation.
124. 9:34–9:39More briskly, this is the same style of reasoning that will, in time, carry us all the way to
125. 9:39–9:45God, an inference from effect to a cause required by the effect, nothing mystical, nothing merely
126. 9:45–9:47asserted.
127. 9:47–9:51Scene 9, Whom does ritual consecrate?
128. 9:51–9:54Exposition of skia, and its critique.
129. 9:54–9:59The essay with Macron khyayi teacher rises.
130. 9:59–10:03Let me offer our school's account, since it touches your very question.
131. 10:03–10:10We hold that prakthi, primordial nature, unconscious but active, woven of the three goas, undertakes
132. 10:10–10:16all transformation of the world unaided, for the sake of Purua's liberation.
133. 10:16–10:22No further cause, unseen merit or God, is required, prakthi alone suffices as the
134. 10:22–10:26ground of rituals power and the world's unfolding.
135. 10:26–10:32With respect, but firm, an elegant system, teacher, and I will grant it much.
136. 10:32–10:38But consider, Prakti, as you describe her, is one, undifferentiated at the root, acting
137. 10:38–10:41always by the same essential nature.
138. 10:41–10:47A single, uniform cause, left to itself, cannot by itself explain a sequence of unlike
139. 10:47–10:52effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn.
140. 10:52–10:57If she produces successively, something must account for the order of that succession, and
141. 10:57–11:03that something is exactly the kind of unseen, individuating cause I am arguing for.
142. 11:03–11:08Grant me that much, and we are no longer very far apart, you have simply not yet given
143. 11:08–11:10it the name I give it.
144. 11:10–11:17Measured, we will not settle that today. But I can see the difficulty is real."
145. 11:17–11:21Seem 10, the Kavaka is answered.
146. 11:21–11:25The Kurvka steps forward, impatient.
147. 11:25–11:29Enough delicacy. There is no unseen anything.
148. 11:29–11:37What is not seen touched, or reason for direct perception is simply not there to reason about. Ritual is habit.
149. 11:37–11:40The next world is a story told to keep the poor obedient.
150. 11:42–11:47Then answer me plainly, Carvaca, why do sincere people perform rights that cost them,
151. 11:47–11:52that bring them no worldly return, that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation,
152. 11:52–11:57and still they persist, quietly, without display? You have called it habit.
153. 11:59–12:05But habit needs a first cause too, and every account you offer, pleasure, custom, deception,
154. 12:05–12:10A Founder's cunning collapses the moment it is tested, as I have already shown this assembly.
155. 12:11–12:14What is not directly seen is not thereby proven false.
156. 12:15–12:20It is simply what must be established by inference, which is the very tool you yourself use to walk
157. 12:20–12:24from smoke to fire, that you have never seen the two joined at the source.
158. 12:26–12:29Grudging, inference I permit. Faith I do not.
159. 12:29–12:36Then let us continue by inference alone. That is all I have asked of anyone in this hall.
160. 12:36–12:45Scene 11, The Border and the Doctrine of Momentariness. The BAUDDHA Steps Forward.
161. 12:45–12:52Udayana, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who richly acts today and
162. 12:52–12:59reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit, but nothing endures. Every existent
163. 12:59–13:04is momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears. What you call the
164. 13:04–13:10same person tomorrow is only a causal series, each moment new.
165. 13:10–13:15Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was sown by a moment that no longer exists
166. 13:15–13:21at the time of reaping? If nothing endures even an instant longer than it's arising,
167. 13:21–13:26the doer of the deed and the receiver of the fruit are, by your own account, two different,
168. 13:26–13:32unconnected momentary existence, and moral responsibility itself dissolves.
169. 13:32–13:37Consider, too, how ordinary recognition works, I see a jar today and know it as the same
170. 13:37–13:42jar I saw yesterday, not a new jar resembling the old.
171. 13:42–13:47If that recognition of identity were always illusion, no cognition of difference between
172. 13:47–13:52two moments could stand as reliable either, since both rest on the same faculty of comparing
173. 13:52–13:54across time.
174. 13:54–13:59persistence root and branch, and you cannot even trust the doubt you have just raised against me,
175. 13:59–14:03for even raising a doubt requires that the one who doubted a moment ago and the one who now
176. 14:03–14:10speaks are the same continuing self. Quieter, we say the continuity is causal, not substantial.
177. 14:11–14:16And a causal series sufficiently unified to carry karmic fruit across time is,
178. 14:16–14:20in every respect that matters here, what I mean by an enduring self.
179. 14:20–14:28self. We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, monk. But something persists.
180. 14:28–14:32On that, this bouquet cannot yield.
181. 14:32–14:39Seen 12, persistence and causality reconciled, the objection on the eternal self.
182. 14:39–14:44Returning, more careful now, grant persistence, then. Still, if an object's very nature is
183. 14:44–14:49to be a cause, must it not cause its effect always, everywhere, the moment it exists,
184. 14:49–14:52The way blue is always blue?
185. 14:52–14:56Yet an eternal, all-pervading self is not seen to produce pleasure and pain at every
186. 14:56–14:57moment.
187. 14:57–15:03How, then, can causality and an eternal self be reconciled at all?
188. 15:03–15:10Because causality is not, any object automatically produces any effect it is capable of, always.
189. 15:10–15:15It is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect, ascertained
190. 15:15–15:20sometimes by watching agreement and difference, and, where that fails, as with something eternal
191. 15:20–15:25and everywhere present, which cannot be absent anywhere to test the difference side, ascertained
192. 15:25–15:30instead through a reason that establishes the causal relation directly.
193. 15:30–15:36The self produces pleasure and pain only in conjunction with its proper auxiliary conditions,
194. 15:36–15:42mind, body, the ripening of that same unseen potency we spoke of earlier.
195. 15:42–15:46Everything blue produces every blue thing's effects at all times either, a particular
196. 15:46–15:53cause, with its particular auxiliary's present, produces its particular effect.
197. 15:53–15:58That is simply what causality means, once stated carefully, an ordinary experience confirms
198. 15:58–16:01it at every turn.
199. 16:01–16:03Concluding Prayer
200. 16:03–16:08Scene 13, concluding prayer of the first Bakae.
201. 16:08–16:14Udyana turns again toward the unseen image, the whole quiets.
202. 16:14–16:19That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals each soul its portion, call it Maya, since
203. 16:19–16:24the mind cannot grasp it whole, call it Prakti, since all creation springs from it, call it
204. 16:24–16:29Evidya, since knowledge alone dissolves it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole
205. 16:29–16:34disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wake devotion in my heart
206. 16:34–16:39and stand as witness, visibly, to what I offer here.
207. 16:39–16:44Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sava, lamp still burning, as assembly murmurs, some
208. 16:44–16:49persuaded, some still folding their arms, the debate visibly unfinished, waiting for the
209. 16:49–16:52second bouquet.
210. 16:52–16:57Act 2 The second bouquet of flowers.
211. 16:57–17:02Seem 1, why an omniscient being is still needed.
212. 17:02–17:07We have established, across the first bouquet, that an unseen destiny governs the fruit of
213. 17:07–17:08every act.
214. 17:08–17:14But destiny itself must have some cause, and no creature among us can perceive that cause
215. 17:14–17:16directly.
216. 17:16–17:20No one acts purposefully toward what lies wholly beyond cognition.
217. 17:20–17:26So, some extraordinary, omniscient being must exist, able to hand down to us true knowledge
218. 17:26–17:31of that hidden causal link, so that we may act rightly at all.
219. 17:31–17:36Stepping forward, unhurried, why reach for an omnipotent God, Udayana, when the beginningless,
220. 17:36–17:41unbroken chain of Vedic tradition already carries that knowledge to us?
221. 17:41–17:46Or, if you distrust an ortholous Veda, the sage Kapila and others attained omniscience
222. 17:46–17:49through yoga and discipline alone.
223. 17:49–17:52Neither requires your God.
224. 17:52–17:56Because valid cognition depends on causes outside itself, and the world is not,
225. 17:56–17:59on any account, unbroken.
226. 17:59–18:03It dissolves, periodically, entirely.
227. 18:03–18:08When it dissolves, the unbroken transmission of the Vedic dissolves with it, there is no
228. 18:08–18:12teacher, no student, no sound in the air.
229. 18:12–18:17Nor can we rest the whole edifice on sages like Kapila, whose access to hidden truths
230. 18:17–18:21I intend to test directly before this bouquet closes.
231. 18:21–18:25Something must renew the tradition after every dissolution.
232. 18:25–18:29That is the thread I mean to follow now.
233. 18:29–18:36to is validity known from within or from outside. Before you reach for God, settle a smaller
234. 18:36–18:42question first, one my school and yours have long disputed. When a cognition arises, is
235. 18:42–18:48its truth known automatically in the very arising of it? I say yes, to cognize something
236. 18:48–18:55at all simply is to take it as true. What later proves false was, on inspection, never
237. 18:55–19:02truly a cognition. Then explain doubt, M'saka. If validity announced itself the instant a
238. 19:02–19:08cognition arose, no cognition could ever be doubted, yet we doubt constantly, the moment
239. 19:08–19:14a cognition doesn't resemble others already confirmed true. Volidity, like in validity,
240. 19:14–19:19is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing, a further mark, a further
241. 19:19–19:23inference, a test in successful action.
242. 19:23–19:27But your external test invites its own regress.
243. 19:27–19:32If a second cognition is needed to certify the first, a third is needed to certify the
244. 19:32–19:35second, and so on without end.
245. 19:35–19:41Not so, because most of the time, certifying validity is simply unnecessary.
246. 19:41–19:46Where there is neither doubt nor a reason for doubt, belief in an object arises and
247. 19:46–19:50and we act on it without any separate act of certification.
248. 19:50–19:56Only where doubt genuinely arises does the further inference come in, and there, it terminates,
249. 19:56–20:00because the regress you fear threatens your intrinsic validity doctrine exactly as much
250. 20:00–20:02as mine.
251. 20:02–20:08You too must postulate that a cognitions, being known, is itself validly postulated,
252. 20:08–20:12prove that, and you are inferring all over again.
253. 20:12–20:16A Thin Smile, a Fair Hit.
254. 20:16–20:21the thirsty man who drinks the moment he sees water. You'd say he directly perceives
255. 20:21–20:28water's power to quench thirst, since he acts without hesitation. He does not.
256. 20:28–20:34That power is inferred, instantly and unconsciously, from past experience, the way desire itself
257. 20:34–20:40is born from a swift, silent inference that a certain action gets a certain result.
258. 20:40–20:49is not sameness. An extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remains extrinsic.
259. 20:49–20:54Scene 3, Dream, Waking, and Maus 2 hands.
260. 20:54–20:58Returning to the floor, then tell me how any of us tells waking from dreaming at all,
261. 20:58–21:04Wadayana, if validity is never simply given. I dream I am drowning in a pond, the terror
262. 21:04–21:08is total, indistinguishable in the moment from any waking terror, until I wake and
263. 21:08–21:15find no water anywhere. And the moment you wake, the two states stand in sharp, undeniable
264. 21:15–21:21opposition, the dim memory of the dream against the vivid immediacy of waking. That contrast
265. 21:21–21:26is itself the criterion, it does not need to be imported from anywhere else, because
266. 21:26–21:30waking experience applies its own standard against which the dream is measured and found
267. 21:30–21:38wanting. The western logicians raise a sharper doubt still. A philosopher, Moore, they call
268. 21:38–21:42him held up both his hands before a haul and said here is one hand here is another
269. 21:42–21:48therefore external objects are real. His critics answered if your very eyes could be doubted
270. 21:48–21:55showing us your hands proves nothing. Unbothered let them doubt on. A biological possibility
271. 21:55–22:00that evidence might someday surface against a fact is not the same as evidence that has surfaced.
272. 22:02–22:07Push that skepticism to its root and you land on the law of non-contradiction itself.
273. 22:07–22:12Call it a tautology if you like, empty of content, but even the skeptic must stand on it to say
274. 22:12–22:19anything at all, including his doubt. I do not need certainty invulnerable to every conceivable
275. 22:19–22:25future. I need what any reasonable inquiry needs, the balance of evidence, honestly weighed.
276. 22:26–22:32And on that balance, Nyaya's account of validity, known through Mark's external to bear cognition,
277. 22:32–22:39confirmed finally by successful action carries the greater weight. Illusion and error are undeniable
278. 22:39–22:48facts of experience. If, as Yumsaka say, everything cognized is thereby true, what, then, are illusion
279. 22:48–22:55and error. You have no answer for that. Seem 4. Proofs that sound is not eternal.
280. 22:55–23:03Grant me this much, then, and let me change ground. Even without your God, the Vader need
281. 23:03–23:08not be authored at all, the Vader, and the very sound it is made of, may simply be eternal,
282. 23:08–23:13requiring no faultless speaker and no author to answer for.
283. 23:13–23:18Then I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing. We
284. 23:18–23:25say, every day, that sound has stopped, the drum was struck, and now it is silent.
285. 23:25–23:29That is a direct cognition of sound's destruction.
286. 23:29–23:34Sound cannot have merely moved elsewhere, being formless, it cannot have been covered
287. 23:34–23:38over, for covering belongs to things with shape, it has not merely grown too faint for
288. 23:38–23:43us, for the same excuse would prove that a shattered pot has not really broken, only
289. 23:43–23:45become invisible.
290. 23:45–23:50But the ear cannot perceive that absence directly, its substratum, ether, cannot be perceived
291. 23:50–23:52at all.
292. 23:52–23:57The ear need not perceive ether to perceive the absence of sound in the ear, precisely
293. 23:57–24:02as darkness is perceived as the absence of light, without anyone perceiving the invisible
294. 24:02–24:05particles that would be its locus.
295. 24:05–24:11And listen to the sound itself, pitch rises, falls, loudens, softens, one and the same
296. 24:11–24:16eternal thing cannot bear opposed qualities at once.
297. 24:16–24:22What you call, the same word, recognized again, is a flame recognized again, new fuel,
298. 24:22–24:27light, each moment, called by one name out of habit.
299. 24:27–24:31Production and destruction, not eternity, is what your own ear tells you, if you will
300. 24:31–24:33trust it.
301. 24:33–24:38Quieter, the tradition will need to answer you on this at length, elsewhere.
302. 24:38–24:40It will.
303. 24:40–24:46For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken Veda, is produced, and what
304. 24:46–24:48is produced can be lost.
305. 24:48–24:55which returns us to the question, who restores it, each time the world dissolves and forgets.
306. 24:55–25:00Scene 5, How Can A New Creation Even Begin?
307. 25:00–25:02Suppose I grant dissolution.
308. 25:02–25:06During dissolution, on your own account, nothing moves, nothing acts, the sky itself
309. 25:06–25:08stands empty and still.
310. 25:08–25:15What, then, could possibly initiate a new creation out of absolute stillness?
311. 25:15–25:21deep sleep first, as a smaller case of the same puzzle. In dreamless sleep the self's
312. 25:21–25:27cognition, desire, pleasure, and pain all fall silent together, yet the body's breath continues,
313. 25:27–25:34faint, and the self wakes again undamaged. So too at cosmic dissolution, an extremely
314. 25:34–25:39subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements, too fine to register as,
315. 25:39–25:45world, until its final stage marks the moment and becomes the seed of new creation.
316. 25:45–25:50It is not that a day must always be preceded by another day of its own kind, the first day
317. 25:50–25:56of the monsoon is preceded by the last day of summer, not by another rainy day.
318. 25:56–26:01So too the first day of a new creation is preceded by dissolution, not by another day
319. 26:01–26:03of an old world.
320. 26:03–26:09And the first human beings, the first brahmins, the first speakers of any tongue at all?
321. 26:09–26:13No parent taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach.
322. 26:13–26:19As the first scorpion arises from rotten dung, not from a scorpion parent, and only later generations
323. 26:19–26:24breed true, so the supreme Lord may himself take the forms of teacher and pupil at the
324. 26:24–26:29world's dawn, gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet's hand toward a distant object, and
325. 26:29–26:34in that gesture teach the very first convention of word and meaning.
326. 26:34–26:38From that first instruction the whole chain, potter to potter, weaver to weaver, teacher
327. 26:38–26:44to student, descends unbroken until the next dissolution breaks it again.
328. 26:44–26:50Scene 6, the long decline, and why scripture needs restoring.
329. 26:50–26:54Turning to the hall, more somber, and do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today
330. 26:54–26:57as it once did.
331. 26:57–27:00Look honestly at what is already frayed.
332. 27:00–27:05Rights once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches now survive, if at
333. 27:05–27:12all, through a single branch, imperfectly kept. Dharma once stood on four legs, austerity,
334. 27:12–27:21knowledge, sacrifice, charity. Austerity fell, two legs remained. Knowledge fell, one leg,
335. 27:21–27:27charity, bears the whole weight now, and even that leg is wounded. Then say plainly what
336. 27:27–27:35you are building toward. That scripture is not self-sustaining. Its authority depends
337. 27:35–27:39on the Veda, not on the general good conduct of virtuous people copying one another, for
338. 27:39–27:44if virtuous conduct alone were sufficient to make an act obligatory, no scriptural injunction
339. 27:44–27:49would be needed at all, and yet we all know rites that have lapsed entirely, with no living
340. 27:49–27:56witness, that must one day be restored, not merely remembered. Restoration needs a knower,
341. 27:56–28:01and faith in scripture merely recognizes truth, it cannot manufacture it once the original
342. 28:01–28:04cause is gone.
343. 28:04–28:09Seem 7, Kapila is tested and found insufficient.
344. 28:09–28:14Then let Kapila serve as that Noah, a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved
345. 28:14–28:20by compassion for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost.
346. 28:20–28:27Gently but without yielding, test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend.
347. 28:27–28:33may indeed be a means of knowing what is otherwise hidden, I do not deny it wholesale, but meditation
348. 28:33–28:37does not automatically yield knowledge the instant it is practiced, it needs some other
349. 28:37–28:41means to confirm what it has found.
350. 28:41–28:45What confirms Kapila's meditation on compassion and non-violence, whose fruits no one has
351. 28:45–28:51ever seen? A coward meditates fruitfully on a snake only because he has met a snake
352. 28:51–28:53before.
353. 28:53–28:58No one has met the fruit of yoga directly, in this life or between two lives, for the
354. 28:58–29:02body that acts in this birth and the body that reach the fruit in the next are not even
355. 29:02–29:07the same body, and without some experienced link joining the two, the connection cannot
356. 29:07–29:09be verified at all.
357. 29:09–29:13It is said some remember former births.
358. 29:13–29:16It is said, but not established.
359. 29:16–29:20A teacher who falls asleep on a holiday night and resumes yesterday's lesson that dawn
360. 29:20–29:26proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two.
361. 29:26–29:31And consider the very first Brahmins, at creation's dawn, by what memory could they have known
362. 29:31–29:36their own lineage, if no one had yet been born to remember it.
363. 29:36–29:40No power of travel between worlds is proven either, that might have carried settlers in
364. 29:40–29:44bearing a caste system ready-made.
365. 29:44–29:50It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, onniplicant being,
366. 29:50–29:56who needs no body, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, then to multiply and
367. 29:56–30:01proven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly.
368. 30:01–30:05After a silence, I will carry the question forward, Ludiana.
369. 30:05–30:08I do not yet carry your conclusion.
370. 30:08–30:14That is exactly as debate should stand, at the end of its second round.
371. 30:14–30:18Scene 8, concluding prayer of the second bouquet.
372. 30:18–30:23Udayana turns once more toward the unseen image.
373. 30:23–30:28May my heart hold fast to Shiva until life's last moment, he who, aided by the destinies
374. 30:28–30:33of every being, builds this astonishing world again and again, and, like a magician undoing
375. 30:33–30:38his own trick, un-makes it again, whose will runs unopposed through the whole of the
376. 30:38–30:42cosmos, who is its final cause.
377. 30:42–30:46On that Lord alone, let my devotion rest unmoved.
378. 30:46–30:48Curtain falls slowly.
379. 30:48–30:52The M'saka remains seated in thought as the lamp dims.
380. 30:52–30:58Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted, though no one yet concedes.
381. 30:58–31:03Act 3 The Third Bokeh of Flowers
382. 31:03–31:08Seem one, he is not seen, therefore he is not.
383. 31:08–31:12Stepping forward first, before Udayana can begin.
384. 31:12–31:16You have spent two bouquets building toward a maker of the world, Udayana.
385. 31:16–31:19I will spend this one demolishing the foundation.
386. 31:19–31:25If God existed, He ought to be knowable, as a cow's horn is knowable by its shape and color.
387. 31:25–31:27He is not known.
388. 31:27–31:32Therefore He does not exist, exactly as a hare's horn does not exist, precisely because, though
389. 31:32–31:37its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one has ever perceived one.
390. 31:37–31:41A clean argument, and cleanly wrong at its first step.
391. 31:41–31:45Your inference works only where the object was already granted to be perceptible, the
392. 31:45–31:51The hare's horn fails the test of perception it was always eligible to sit.
393. 31:51–31:55God was never claimed by any theist in this hall to be an object of ordinary perception
394. 31:55–31:57at all.
395. 31:57–32:02You cannot fault an unseen thing for failing a test it was never entered into.
396. 32:02–32:07Then how is he known, if not by the one method you now exempt him from?
397. 32:07–32:13By inference, which is precisely what these five bouquets exist to supply.
398. 32:13–32:17Give your strongest objection for the fifth, when the inferences themselves stand before
399. 32:17–32:19you.
400. 32:19–32:24For now I only clear the ground, non apprehension of a thing never claimed to be apprehensible
401. 32:24–32:26proves nothing.
402. 32:26–32:32Seem to, sleep, the self, and what non apprehension cannot touch.
403. 32:32–32:36Consider your own self, then, as a test case.
404. 32:36–32:40In dreamless sleep you do not apprehend your own self, yet you do not conclude,
405. 32:40–32:46waking, that you had ceased to exist. Why does the same silence, applied to God, not equally
406. 32:46–32:48prove his absence?
407. 32:48–32:53Because in sleep the causes that would produce self-cognition are simply not assembled, the
408. 32:53–32:58mind has withdrawn from the senses, not because the self has vanished, but because the instrument
409. 32:58–33:01of noticing it has gone quiet.
410. 33:01–33:06The very fact you rely on, that no one doubts their own continued existence through a dreamless
411. 33:06–33:12night, is itself proof that non-apprehension does not entail non-existence. You have refuted
412. 33:12–33:16your own method with your own example.
413. 33:16–33:21Recovering. Then try this instead, a conscious being ought to show bodily activity, as the
414. 33:21–33:26sprouting sage shows the gardener's hand. No divine activity is seen before a single
415. 33:26–33:30sprout appears. No activity, no agent.
416. 33:30–33:34A pot needs an embodied potter. The world does not thereby need an embodied maker
417. 33:34–33:41of the identical kind. The self persists, unmoving, through sleep, through fainting,
418. 33:41–33:46through the stillness of poison or extreme cold, without any bodily sign at all, different
419. 33:46–33:51effects proceed from different kinds of causes, and there is no law binding every maker to
420. 33:51–33:54a visible hand.
421. 33:54–33:59Scene 3 – The Carvaka's Wager, and why it cannot be cached
422. 33:59–34:03The kirkastepsim, sharper than before.
423. 34:03–34:07Let me strip this down further than the atheist dares.
424. 34:07–34:09I do not even require.
425. 34:09–34:12Knowable but unknown, as your loophole.
426. 34:12–34:14My rule is simpler.
427. 34:14–34:18What is not known, in any sense, does not exist.
428. 34:18–34:20What is known exists.
429. 34:20–34:22God is never known.
430. 34:22–34:24Finished?
431. 34:24–34:28Then finish it, Kravaka, and see where it leads you.
432. 34:28–34:33On your rule, the moment you step outside your own house, you no longer perceive your
433. 34:33–34:38wife, your children, your stored grain, by your own law, they must be judged destroyed
434. 34:38–34:41the instant your eyes leave them.
435. 34:41–34:43Do you believe that?
436. 34:43–34:48Irritated, memory assures me they remain.
437. 34:48–34:53Memory assures you of many destroyed things too, a childhood house long since fallen,
438. 34:53–34:55a friend long dead.
439. 34:55–34:59Memory alone cannot certify present existence.
440. 34:59–35:04The instant you lean on memory to save your family from your own rule, you have conceded
441. 35:04–35:10exactly what I need, non-apprehension does not prove non-existence.
442. 35:10–35:14And consider the I itself, the very organ you're seeing, depends on is never itself
443. 35:14–35:18seen, yet you do not doubt it exists.
444. 35:18–35:24Your rule, followed honestly, destroys your own instrument of doubting.
445. 35:24–35:30conduct does not need certainty. It runs on probability, general agreement, tested by
446. 35:30–35:32use.
447. 35:32–35:38Then where does probability live, on your account? If a thing is seen, you say its existence
448. 35:38–35:45is certain, if unseen, its absence is certain. You have left no middle ground for probability
449. 35:45–35:50to stand on at all. You have described a doctrine with no room for the very mode
450. 35:50–35:54of belief you say it rests on.
451. 35:54–35:59In full, why inference itself survives the doubt?
452. 35:59–36:02Grant inference some ground then, if you insist.
453. 36:02–36:06But how is doubt about it ever finally removed?
454. 36:06–36:11Every observed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition
455. 36:11–36:14we haven't thought to check.
456. 36:14–36:17That thread never closes.
457. 36:17–36:20It closes the moment you notice something you have already conceded.
458. 36:20–36:25To doubt a future deviation, you must already be able to think about the future, and that
459. 36:25–36:31very capacity is inference, extended from present time through hour, day, and season.
460. 36:31–36:35You cannot use inference to attack inference without borrowing the very tool you are trying
461. 36:35–36:38to disqualify.
462. 36:38–36:43And practically, doubt ends where a counterfactual would trap the doubter in his own contradiction,
463. 36:43–36:48deny that cause and effect are reliably connected, and the very act of doubting, itself
464. 36:48–36:52an effect, could never have arisen in you at all.
465. 36:52–36:57A reasonable mind does not chase every conceivable exception forever, it follows a reason whose
466. 36:57–37:02provision has been tested and holds, and acts.
467. 37:02–37:07Withdrawing, unconvince but out of ground, carry it forward then.
468. 37:07–37:10I will listen to the rest.
469. 37:10–37:16Scene 5, comparison, and the fifth Bacchese coming test, set aside.
470. 37:16–37:22A precise, categorical voice, one more avenue, L'diana, before you move on.
471. 37:22–37:28Some hold comparison, cognition through observed similarity, to be its own independent means
472. 37:28–37:32of knowledge, distinct from perception and inference.
473. 37:32–37:35If so, a difficulty for you follows.
474. 37:35–37:39Everything known resembles something else already known, but the God you describe has
475. 37:39–37:42nothing else similar to him anywhere.
476. 37:42–37:48comparison then prove his absence by that very singularity?
477. 37:48–37:52Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor non-being, and no
478. 37:52–37:55such third kind exists.
479. 37:55–38:02Being and non-being exhaust the field, deny one, and you have thereby affirmed the other.
480. 38:02–38:06Similarity is simply a property of things that already are, sorted under one or the
481. 38:06–38:11other of those two categories, it needs no independent status, and therefore yields
482. 38:11–38:17no independent weapon against a being who happens, by his nature, to be singular.
483. 38:17–38:22Uniqueness is not a defect that argument can weaponize, it is simply a fact some subjects
484. 38:22–38:25have and others don't.
485. 38:25–38:31Seem 6, Verbal Testimony, and the Disputo for an Omniscient Author
486. 38:31–38:34Returning to the floor, then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole
487. 38:34–38:39bouquet circles back to whether the Vader needs an author at all.
488. 38:39–38:45The vayika treats an ordinary sentences meaning as something inferred from the speaker's intention,
489. 38:45–38:48testimony reduced to a kind of inference.
490. 38:48–38:53My own school's Prabhakara branch goes further, only the veda, being ortholess, carries independent
491. 38:53–38:59authority, an ordinary human sentence is trustworthy only once inference has certified the speaker
492. 38:59–39:01reliable.
493. 39:01–39:06Both positions ask testimony to do more work than it needs to.
494. 39:06–39:10The moment you already know a word's expressive power, the sentence as meaning arrives with
495. 39:10–39:15the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker's
496. 39:15–39:20reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all.
497. 39:20–39:25A child who does not yet know whether the Veda has an author still understands a Vedic
498. 39:25–39:29sentence perfectly well the moment he hears it, that alone shows understanding does not
499. 39:29–39:32wait on settling authorship first.
500. 39:32–39:38Testimony is its own means of knowledge, standing beside perception and inference, not smuggled
501. 39:38–39:41inference wearing a disguise.
502. 39:41–39:45Then consider the sharper objection some raise directly against you if an omniscient creator
503. 39:45–39:50composed even human language itself at the world's dawn, teaching the first speaker's
504. 39:50–39:54word by word, how could such teaching ever get off the ground, with no shared word
505. 39:54–39:58yet existing between teacher and pupil to teach with?
506. 39:58–40:04As I have already shown you, in the second bouquet, through gesture before word, exactly
507. 40:04–40:08as a puppeteer's chord makes a puppet's hand point at a distant thing, and the watching
508. 40:08–40:14child infers meaning from the pointing before any word is spoken at all.
509. 40:14–40:18Instruction need not presuppose language completed, it can begin language, gesture
510. 40:18–40:20first, word following.
511. 40:20–40:23I do not ask you to accept this today.
512. 40:23–40:30I only ask you to notice that the objection, however sharp it sounds, has already been met.
513. 40:30–40:37Scene 7, Postulation and Non-Apprehension, Briefly Wade and Found Insufficient
514. 40:37–40:41Examination of Postulation as an Independent Means of Knowledge
515. 40:41–40:46Examination of Non-Apprehension as an Independent Means of Knowledge, and Further Examination
516. 40:46–40:48of the Same
517. 40:48–40:54and then the other, Udayana, since you have answered comparison and testimony. Postulation,
518. 40:54–41:00first, the inference forced on us when a known fact makes no sense otherwise. Does postulation
519. 41:00–41:06not, in some case, force us to explain the world without God, and so crowd Him out?
520. 41:06–41:11Show me the fact that only makes sense without a maker, and I will answer it directly, but
521. 41:11–41:15no one in this hall has yet produced one. Every alleged case of postulation against
522. 41:15–41:21God turns out, on inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation's name, an ordinary
523. 41:21–41:25inference I have already answered at length.
524. 41:25–41:30Then non-apprehension once more, in its fullest form, not merely I have not seen him, which
525. 41:30–41:34you answered in the first scene, but the deeper M.M.A. with Macron so with Macron claimed
526. 41:34–41:38that non-apprehension is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that
527. 41:38–41:42at silence regarding God should count as positive evidence.
528. 41:42–41:47Patient, but visibly nearing the end of a long day's argument, trace it carefully and
529. 41:47–41:49it collapses into perception after all.
530. 41:49–41:54A normal, unimpaired sense produces the determinate cognition, no pot here, by apprehending the
531. 41:54–41:59place where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences
532. 41:59–42:01in general.
533. 42:01–42:06And a faculty that is, at bottom, perception in another guy's inherits exactly the limit
534. 42:06–42:08perception already had.
535. 42:08–42:13can report the absence only of what it was ever fit to detect in the first place. God
536. 42:13–42:20was never within that fitness. The silence proves nothing new. It only restates, for the
537. 42:20–42:24third time this bouquet, the very first answer I gave you.
538. 42:24–42:30A long pause, then a small, honest nod. Then I have exhausted perception, inference
539. 42:30–42:35by non-apprehension, comparison, testimony, and postulation, and none of them has delivered
540. 42:35–42:37me your absence.
541. 42:37–42:43That exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time.
542. 42:43–42:47That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole bokeh.
543. 42:47–42:51C. Nate, closing prayer of the third bokeh.
544. 42:51–42:57Udyana turns, one last time this act, toward the unseen image.
545. 42:57–43:02With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshipped across every tradition in this
546. 43:02–43:07hall under a hundred names, whose quiet festival of bliss no rival joy equals, whose reality
547. 43:07–43:13no perception can catch in discard, no inference overturn, no other means of knowledge unseat,
548. 43:13–43:18and on whom, in the end, every one of those means of knowledge itself depends to be trustworthy
549. 43:18–43:20at all.
550. 43:20–43:24Curtain Falls The atheist remains standing a moment longer
551. 43:24–43:29than the rest of the assembly before he, too, sits.
552. 43:29–43:35Act 4. The Fourth Bacché of Flowers.
553. 43:35–43:39Seem one, can omniscience even be valid cognition?
554. 43:39–43:45One more difficulty, Udayana, and it strikes at the root of everything you have built. You
555. 43:45–43:50call God Omniscient. But valid cognition, by definition, must know
556. 43:50–43:55something not already known, otherwise memory itself would count as a valid means of knowledge,
557. 43:55–44:02which no one accepts. God's knowledge is total, nothing is ever new to him. If nothing is ever
558. 44:02–44:07new to him, on your own definition, nothing he knows can count as valid knowledge at
559. 44:07–44:13all. And if his knowledge is not valid, he is no trustworthy author of anything, including
560. 44:13–44:17the vader you have spent three bouquets defending.
561. 44:17–44:22Then the flaw is in that definition, not in God. Knowing what was not known before,
562. 44:22–44:29cannot be what makes a cognition true, it is both too narrow and too wide. Too narrow,
563. 44:29–44:35see the same jar twice, and the second seeing is every bit as true as the first, though nothing
564. 44:35–44:41is new in it. Too wide, an illusion may present something never seen before and still be
565. 44:41–44:46false. Novelty tracks neither truth nor falsehood.
566. 44:46–44:51What makes a cognition true is simply this, that it corresponds to how the thing actually
567. 44:51–44:58is. By that measure, God's cognition, being total and never in error, is as true as any
568. 44:58–45:03cognition could be, whether or not any of it is, new to Him.
569. 45:03–45:08Then how do you distinguish a second true seeing of the same jar from mere memory? We
570. 45:08–45:14do not call memory a means of knowledge. Because memory depends entirely on a prior
571. 45:14–45:20cognition to borrow its content from, it cannot arise from nothing. A fresh seeing of the
572. 45:20–45:25The same jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through its own causes, not
573. 45:25–45:28recalled from a store.
574. 45:28–45:33And God's case is simpler still than either, His cognition of the whole universe is a single,
575. 45:33–45:38self-identical act, dependent on no other cognition before it, needing no second glance
576. 45:38–45:40at anything.
577. 45:40–45:46Call it neither new nor old, it simply is, entire, all at once.
578. 45:46–45:52to the bid for knownness, three attempts, three failures.
579. 45:52–45:55Let me try a different door, then.
580. 45:55–45:59Surely cognition does something to its object, leave some mark on it.
581. 45:59–46:04We call this mark of knownness, the property an object gains, simply by being known, of
582. 46:04–46:07having been known.
583. 46:07–46:12Without it, being produced of in your own inference for a divine maker becomes untrustworthy,
584. 46:12–46:15because an agent who leaves no trace on what he touches can hardly be said to know
585. 46:15–46:18his own materials.
586. 46:18–46:22Three ways to argue for such a mark, and non-survive testing.
587. 46:22–46:28First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a
588. 46:28–46:32result, and that result is knownness.
589. 46:32–46:37But an arrow shot at the empty sky produces no result in the sky, cognition may be like
590. 46:37–46:41that arrow, real motion, no mark left behind.
591. 46:41–46:46Second, that we say, the pot is known, and this phrase itself proves some new property
592. 46:46–46:49sits on the pot.
593. 46:49–46:53But we equally say, the pot was destroyed, of a pot that no longer exists to receive
594. 46:53–46:59any property at all, language describing a relation to an act does not, by itself, prove
595. 46:59–47:02a real residue in the object.
596. 47:02–47:07Third, that the very fact we can talk about cognition proves some perceptible trace
597. 47:07–47:09it leaves.
598. 47:09–47:14But the causes that let us talk about a cognition are the very same causes that produce the cognition
599. 47:14–47:20in the first place, nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk.
600. 47:20–47:24Then Knowness explains nothing that cognition's own nature doesn't already explain on its
601. 47:24–47:26own.
602. 47:26–47:27Just so.
603. 47:27–47:32A cognition of a pot is a cognition of a pot by its own nature, exactly as an effort
604. 47:32–47:36to lift a stone is an effort concerning that stone by its own nature, without either
605. 47:36–47:41one depositing some third thing into what it touches.
606. 47:41–47:45Seem three, is cognition itself something we perceive?
607. 47:45–47:50Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself.
608. 47:50–47:55How do you even know a cognition has occurred, if not through some further cognition perceiving
609. 47:55–47:59it, endlessly, one behind the next?
610. 47:59–48:02Not endlessly, directly.
611. 48:02–48:06The moment an indeterminate awareness of some external thing arises, the very fact
612. 48:06–48:12of being a cognition is already faintly present alongside it to the mind, on the next moment,
613. 48:12–48:16when a further cognition of that same object arises, the mind turns and knows the earlier
614. 48:16–48:21cognition determinately, the way a first fire recognized in one's own kitchen lets one
615. 48:21–48:26recognize, by the same mark, a second fire glimpsed later on a distant hill through
616. 48:26–48:31its smoke. Cognition is not itself perceived through
617. 48:31–48:36some second, separate cognition standing outside it, the mind's direct relation to the self,
618. 48:36–48:40in whom cognition inheres, is enough.
619. 48:40–48:43Then answer the harder form of the question.
620. 48:43–48:47On your school's own account, a cognition lasts barely two or three moments before it
621. 48:47–48:49perishes.
622. 48:49–48:53If it is that brief, how does it last long enough both to reveal its object and to
623. 48:53–48:58be caught, itself, by the mind looking back at it?
624. 48:58–49:02And does that fleeting cognition, in its second moment, still grasp the very same object it
625. 49:02–49:08grasped in the first, or has the object, in that instant, already changed?
626. 49:08–49:13The same object, held across both moments, nothing stranger is required than granting
627. 49:13–49:19that a cognition, once arisen, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction,
628. 49:19–49:26to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind's next glance.
629. 49:26–49:30Release the alternative you're gesturing toward, that each vanishing instant would need its
630. 49:30–49:35own vanishing, knownness, to certify it, and that knownness its own further knownness to
631. 49:35–49:40certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one level up, the same infinite regress you
632. 49:40–49:45were trying to rescue, knownness, from in the first place.
633. 49:45–49:50Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not multiplying it.
634. 49:50–49:51Seen 4.
635. 49:51–49:56What, know, means, for a being who does not act.
636. 49:56–50:00to the floor, restless with a colder objection, grant everything so far.
637. 50:00–50:05Still, every means of knowledge we have ever named is defined by doing something, the I
638. 50:05–50:09acts upon light, an inference acts through a middle term, a word acts through a speaker's
639. 50:09–50:10utterance.
640. 50:10–50:16God, on your account, does none of this, no sense contact, no middle term, no speech
641. 50:16–50:18act producing is knowledge.
642. 50:18–50:22By what right, then, do you still call him a knower at all, using a word built
643. 50:22–50:25entirely out of agency?
644. 50:25–50:30His ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word's meaning, not the whole of
645. 50:30–50:32how it is actually used.
646. 50:32–50:37We call a sense faculty a means of knowledge, because it is causally involved in producing
647. 50:37–50:39cognition.
648. 50:39–50:45We call God a knower, for a different, equally legitimate reason, cognition simply resides
649. 50:45–50:49in him, as a permanent feature of what he is, without needing to be produced by anything
650. 50:49–50:51at all.
651. 50:51–50:57A person can be a knower without, at this instant, being an agent of anything, knowing does not
652. 50:57–50:59require doing.
653. 50:59–51:05Nor need I claim his cognition is some fifth, undiscovered means of knowledge alongside perception,
654. 51:05–51:08inference, testimony, and the rest.
655. 51:08–51:14Broadened perception to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not
656. 51:14–51:18perception through sense contact specifically, and God's knowing falls naturally under
657. 51:18–51:23that wider sense, without forcing a new category into being.
658. 51:23–51:29Scene 5. Does knowing every error make God's cognition erroneous?
659. 51:29–51:34One last thrust, and then I yield this bouquet. If God is omniscient, he knows every false
660. 51:34–51:39belief every creature has ever held, every illusion, every mistaken inference, every
661. 51:39–51:45dream. But then the objects of all our errors are, in some sense, present within his own
662. 51:45–51:51cognition too. Does that not make his cognition itself shot through with error? And if his
663. 51:51–51:56knowledge already contains our mistakes, what uses his teaching in dispelling them?
664. 51:57–52:02The first hint of a smile all act, you have confused the error with the knowledge of the error,
665. 52:02–52:08friend, and that confusion is exactly the kind of mistake God's cognition, unlike ours,
666. 52:08–52:15never makes. An illusion is false. But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion
667. 52:15–52:24This is a false cognition, is not itself false, it is precisely the opposite, clarity about falsehood, not participation in it.
668. 52:24–52:36God knows every error exactly as it actually is, as error, and a cognition that correctly sees error as error is, by the very definition we settled at the start of this bouquet, true.
669. 52:36–52:41Far from undermining his teaching, that is the only thing that makes his teaching worth
670. 52:41–52:46anything at all, he does not merely hold our mistakes alongside his own truths, he sees
671. 52:46–52:52them as mistakes, which is precisely what we, still caught inside them, cannot yet do for
672. 52:52–52:53ourselves.
673. 52:53–52:59A long breath, then a small bow of the head, I have carried four bouquets of doubt into
674. 52:59–53:04this hall, Udayana, and you have met every one of them without once raising your voice.
675. 53:04–53:08I do not yet call myself answered in full.
676. 53:08–53:13But I no longer call myself your opponent either, only your most stubborn student.
677. 53:13–53:18Warmly, the debate has no better outcome than that, friend.
678. 53:18–53:21Sit, and rest a moment.
679. 53:21–53:25What remains is not defense any longer.
680. 53:25–53:29Scene 6, turning toward the 5th Bokeh.
681. 53:29–53:33Three bouquets of defense are behind this hall now, the doubt that no unseen cause
682. 53:33–53:39exists, the doubt that ritual needs no god, the claim that god can be disproved outright,
683. 53:39–53:43and, in this fourth and shortest Bakae, the question of what it even means to call so still
684. 53:43–53:50a being a noa. Every doubt raised against him has been met and turned.
685. 53:50–53:54One task remains, greater than all the rest, not merely to defend the citadel, but to
686. 53:54–53:59build it, eight proofs, standing on their own feet, requiring no opponent's first move
687. 53:59–54:07at all. That is the fifth bouquet and the summit of this whole garden. Curtain falls softly,
688. 54:07–54:12no music of ending, only a pause, lamp turned brighter for what follows.
689. 54:12–54:18Act 5 The Fifth Bouquet of Flowers.
690. 54:18–54:21Scene 1 Framing the Eight.
691. 54:21–54:26For bouquets, and I have done nothing yet but clear ground, answering doubt, refuting
692. 54:26–54:33attack, defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending.
693. 54:33–54:38Eight proofs stand before you, each sufficient on its own, meeting no opponents first move
694. 54:38–54:43to exist at all, that the world is an effect, that the first motion in the atoms requires
695. 54:43–54:48a mover, that the world is sustained, that it is destroyed, that the very conventions
696. 54:48–54:52of word and craft required a first teacher, that the validity of the scriptural tradition
697. 54:52–54:57demands a trustworthy source, that scripture itself testifies to its author, that even
698. 54:57–55:02bear number, tunis, threenis, in things too small.
699. 55:02–55:07For any of us to count, bears the mark of a counting mind.
700. 55:07–55:12Test each one as harshly as you have tested everything else I have said this evening.
701. 55:12–55:16I ask only that you test them one at a time, on their own ground.
702. 55:16–55:19Begin, then.
703. 55:19–55:23I have not conceded easily tonight, and I will not begin now.
704. 55:23–55:27Good. That is exactly how this should end.
705. 55:27–55:32Seem to. The first proof. The world is in effect.
706. 55:32–55:40The earth, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a pot is produced.
707. 55:40–55:46And nothing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, the world has a maker.
708. 55:46–55:50Then that Maker has a body, as every potter does.
709. 55:50–55:54And if he has a body, he is not the bodiless God you have been building toward for four
710. 55:54–55:56bouquets.
711. 55:56–56:01Press that objection and watch it fall through your own hands.
712. 56:01–56:06Either you are claiming God has a body, in which case you have already granted he exists,
713. 56:06–56:10and merely quibble about his shape, or you are claiming the world was not made by an
714. 56:10–56:14embodied being and conclude from that alone that it was not made at all, which contradicts
715. 56:14–56:18the very inference you are supposedly answering.
716. 56:18–56:22A general cause need not share every feature of the particular causes we happen to have
717. 56:22–56:24seen before.
718. 56:24–56:29Fire is inferred from smoke regardless of which fuel burned, a maker is inferred from
719. 56:29–56:33a made world regardless of whether that maker wears a body.
720. 56:33–56:38Embodied, was never the load bearing part of my proof, you have argued against a word
721. 56:38–56:40I did not need.
722. 56:40–56:473. The Second Proof, Motion in the Atoms. Consider the atoms themselves then, before
723. 56:47–56:53they ever became a world at all. At creation's first instant, atoms that had never before
724. 56:53–57:00move began to move and combine. What is inert cannot move itself, a spade does not swing
725. 57:00–57:06itself into the earth. Something conscious must impel it.
726. 57:06–57:11Quietly, Destiny alone might account for that first motion without any conscious impeller at all.
727. 57:13–57:18Destiny is one cause among several needed, teacher, not a cause that crowds out all the others.
728. 57:19–57:25An inert thing, precisely because it is inert, needs a locus of consciousness to set it moving,
729. 57:25–57:31exactly as a spade needs a hand. You may call the specific motion of a living body,
730. 57:31–57:36different in kind from the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define bodily motion
731. 57:36–57:42any way you choose, and you will find the definition already assumes exactly what I am arguing,
732. 57:42–57:48a special motion, produced by a conscious agent. You cannot use the very thing under dispute to
733. 57:48–57:55disqualify the inference that establishes it. Scene 4, the third and fourth proofs, sustaining
734. 57:55–57:58and destruction.
735. 57:58–58:03The world, immense and heavy as it is, does not fall, as a bird's great weight does not
736. 58:03–58:07fall, sustained by its own effort in flight.
737. 58:07–58:11Something sustains the whole of it, moment to moment, the way effort sustains a living
738. 58:11–58:13body.
739. 58:13–58:19And when that same world is later destroyed, down to the smallest indivisible pair of atoms,
740. 58:19–58:24destruction, too, requires an agent capable of it, precisely as cloth is destroyed only
741. 58:24–58:28by the tearing hand, not by nothing.
742. 58:28–58:32Destiny again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a
743. 58:32–58:35destroyer.
744. 58:35–58:39Destiny is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause acknowledged is not every cause
745. 58:39–58:42excluded.
746. 58:42–58:46If Destiny alone explained the body's sustenance, effort itself would have no work left to do
747. 58:46–58:51in keeping a living creature upright, which is plainly false, as any of us standing
748. 58:51–58:54in this hall could tell you.
749. 58:54–58:59Meaning and destroying are, each one, affects, affects need agents.
750. 58:59–59:03The world's vastness is no exemption from a rule that governs every smaller thing we
751. 59:03–59:06have ever watched rise and fall.
752. 59:06–59:12Scene 5, The Fifth Proof, Who Taught the First Word?
753. 59:12–59:16Consider something closer to home than atoms, the very conventions by which any of us
754. 59:16–59:19here understands the other.
755. 59:19–59:24A potter's craft is learned from another potter, a weavers, from another weaver, a child
756. 59:24–59:29God learns the alphabet from a teacher who learned it from a teacher before.
757. 59:29–59:33Trace that chain back far enough, and you reach a first link, a first potter with no
758. 59:33–59:39potter to learn from, a first speaker with no language yet spoken to be taught in.
759. 59:39–59:45Perhaps the chain simply has no first link, beginningless like the round of rebirth itself.
760. 59:45–59:51The cycle of creation and dissolution is beginningless, monk, I do not dispute that.
761. 59:51–59:56But within any one cycle, at its own fresh dawn, there are no fallen or ordinary human
762. 59:56–1:00:00beings yet available to have originated anything.
763. 1:00:00–1:00:05Something must set the very first convention moving, in each new beginning, the way a
764. 1:00:05–1:00:10puppeteer's gesture, a cord pulled, a hand pointed, teaches a watching child the meaning of a
765. 1:00:10–1:00:15word before any word has yet been spoken between them.
766. 1:00:15–1:00:20That first teacher need not keep a body permanently, scripture itself records a being who takes
767. 1:00:20–1:00:25form again and again, precisely to renew what would otherwise be lost.
768. 1:00:25–1:00:32Seem 6, the 6th and 7th Proofs, a trustworthy tradition, and scriptures own word.
769. 1:00:32–1:00:38Then let me meet you on my own ground, one final time. You say the Vedic traditions
770. 1:00:38–1:00:44validity itself proves a source behind it. But validity, on my school's teaching, needs
771. 1:00:44–1:00:50no external guarantee, it is simply what a properly caused cognition already is.
772. 1:00:50–1:00:54And if every cognition's validity needed a further cognition to certify it, we would
773. 1:00:54–1:00:59face the same regress that has followed us since the second bouquet, a regress I answered
774. 1:00:59–1:01:04then, and answer again now, a tradition this vast, this stable, held by learned people
775. 1:01:04–1:01:09across every generation, is not the kind of thing a single limited person invents from
776. 1:01:09–1:01:11nothing.
777. 1:01:11–1:01:17It requires, at its root, one being of the requisite excellence to originate it truly.
778. 1:01:17–1:01:22And scripture does not merely imply such a source, it names one.
779. 1:01:22–1:01:27In passage after passage, unprompted by any need for praise, the Veda speaks of itself
780. 1:01:27–1:01:33as issuing from a knowing mouth, this Veda issues from me, in every cycle anew.
781. 1:01:33–1:01:38A collection of sentences accepted, on its own authority, by every knowledgeable person
782. 1:01:38–1:01:43who has ever studied it, resting on nothing beyond itself, is not the same thing as an
783. 1:01:43–1:01:47ordinary human composition whose author merely goes unnamed.
784. 1:01:47–1:01:53A long pause, you have carried that thread across four bouquets to reach here.
785. 1:01:53–1:01:59I recognize the shape of the argument, even if I have not yet fully laid down my own.
786. 1:01:59–1:02:03That is honest, and it is enough for tonight.
787. 1:02:03–1:02:09Seven, an interlude, who commands, when scripture commands.
788. 1:02:09–1:02:12One thread you have not yet pulled, Udayana.
789. 1:02:12–1:02:16Scripture does not merely describe it commands.
790. 1:02:16–1:02:18The self should be known.
791. 1:02:18–1:02:22What is a command, if not simply an action, or a desire, already present in the listener
792. 1:02:22–1:02:26without need of any speaker behind it?
793. 1:02:26–1:02:28Neither will serve.
794. 1:02:28–1:02:34action, for, know the self, commands nothing that moves through space at all, and any command
795. 1:02:34–1:02:38reduced to mere action collapses into every ordinary sentence describing a person walking
796. 1:02:38–1:02:40to market.
797. 1:02:40–1:02:46Not desire either, for the very desire to act arises only from cognizing the command's
798. 1:02:46–1:02:50meaning, make desire the meaning of the command, and desire becomes both cause and
799. 1:02:50–1:02:54effect of itself, circular and empty.
800. 1:02:54–1:02:59What a command actually conveys is a speaker's intention that the listener act, and an intention
801. 1:02:59–1:03:03requires, by its very grammar, an intender.
802. 1:03:03–1:03:07You should do this, is meaningless without someone whose desire it expresses concerning
803. 1:03:07–1:03:09you.
804. 1:03:09–1:03:14Every injunction in scripture, examined honestly down to its grammar, points back to a speaker
805. 1:03:14–1:03:17standing behind the verb.
806. 1:03:17–1:03:22Scene 8, the 8th proof, what counts the atoms?
807. 1:03:22–1:03:28And last, the strangest end, to my mind, the most delicate of the eight.
808. 1:03:28–1:03:33A pair of atoms has a certain magnitude, a triad, a magnitude far greater.
809. 1:03:33–1:03:38Too great to be explained by atomic size alone, for if mere multiplication of atoms explained
810. 1:03:38–1:03:43it, two atoms together should already show that same gross size, and they plainly do
811. 1:03:43–1:03:45not.
812. 1:03:45–1:03:50Something beyond bare aggregation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at
813. 1:03:50–1:03:54But a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly.
814. 1:03:54–1:04:01Tunes is not a property lying passively in the pair, it arises through an act of enumeration.
815. 1:04:01–1:04:06And atoms are, by their very nature, invisible to every one of us.
816. 1:04:06–1:04:12Whose enumeration, then, gives the diet its tunes, if no finite creature has ever counted
817. 1:04:12–1:04:14a single atom in its life?
818. 1:04:14–1:04:19Quietly, after a long silence, only an omniscient counter.
819. 1:04:19–1:04:25an omniscient counter. Eight Proofs, Friend, The World as Effect,
820. 1:04:25–1:04:30The Atom's First Motion, Its Sustaining, Its Destruction, The First Teaching of Every Word
821. 1:04:30–1:04:36We Speak, The Validity of an Ancient Trust, Scripture's Own Testimony to its Source,
822. 1:04:36–1:04:41and Now Number itself, Present in What None of Us Could Ever Count Alone.
823. 1:04:41–1:04:46I do not claim any single one of these, standing by itself, could not be picked at by a patient
824. 1:04:46–1:04:51enough opponent across another whole evening, you have shown me tonight exactly how patient
825. 1:04:51–1:04:53this haul can be.
826. 1:04:53–1:04:58I claim only that eight independent lines, converging on the same conclusion from eight
827. 1:04:58–1:05:04different directions no one of them borrowed from the others, are not eight coincidences.
828. 1:05:04–1:05:09That is what a bouquet is, in the end, not one unbreakable flower, but many gathered
829. 1:05:09–1:05:14together, so that even if one petal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole
830. 1:05:14–1:05:16in your hand.
831. 1:05:16–1:05:229. Direct knowing, beyond argument. And is there truly no way to know him except
832. 1:05:22–1:05:27by chains of reasoning, Udayana, eight proofs, each requiring a hall like this one and an
833. 1:05:27–1:05:31evening like this one to walk through?
834. 1:05:31–1:05:37Gentler now, the debate visibly closing, reasoning is not the only door.
835. 1:05:37–1:05:41Yogan's report direct inner knowing of him, the way a dream sometimes shows a mind things
836. 1:05:41–1:05:47no external sense supplied it, not every dream is mere memory replayed, some carry the texture
837. 1:05:47–1:05:50of genuine experience.
838. 1:05:50–1:05:54Through discipline, through the stilling of ordinary restlessness, that same kind of
839. 1:05:54–1:05:59unmediated knowing is said to be possible for God as it is, in smaller measure, for
840. 1:05:59–1:06:02the vividness of a true dream.
841. 1:06:02–1:06:06I have not asked this hall to take that on faith tonight.
842. 1:06:06–1:06:11I have only walked you, proof by proof, toward the point where faith and reason
843. 1:06:11–1:06:15arrive at the same door from different roads.
844. 1:06:15–1:06:19Scene 10, final prayer of the whole bouquet.
845. 1:06:19–1:06:25If even this, eight proofs, offered honestly, tested honestly, cannot move a mind, that mind
846. 1:06:25–1:06:30is stone, and no bouquet of arguments will soften stone.
847. 1:06:30–1:06:33So I do not pray for victory here.
848. 1:06:33–1:06:39I pray instead, may this bouquet of reasoning perfume both nostrils equally, may it satisfy
849. 1:06:39–1:06:44the theist who came already believing, and, in its own time, reach even the atheist who
850. 1:06:44–1:06:46came to break it.
851. 1:06:46–1:06:52And if it cannot do even that much, then let it rest simply as an offering, gathered honestly,
852. 1:06:52–1:06:57kept fresh, laid without expectation at the feet of the Lord of teachers, who alone knows
853. 1:06:57–1:07:01whether the mind that hears it tonight will find its way home sooner, or only later, or
854. 1:07:01–1:07:05by some other road than this halls, entirely.
855. 1:07:05–1:07:07A Long Stillness.
856. 1:07:07–1:07:12Then, one by one, unhurried, the assembly rises.
857. 1:07:12–1:07:15The atheist is the last to stand.
858. 1:07:15–1:07:21The proscenium curtain, crimson and gold, the same curtain that rose on the first bouquet,
859. 1:07:21–1:07:25begins its final, slow descent over the Lamplit Sava.
860. 1:07:25–1:07:31Quietly, as the curtain falls, five bouquets, eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone
861. 1:07:31–1:07:33out all evening.
862. 1:07:33–1:07:35The debate ends here.
863. 1:07:35–1:07:39Whether it ends settled is, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries
864. 1:07:39–1:07:40it out the door.

Plain text

नाटकुसम्जाली, भुखे अव रेजन। अव फिलिसोफिक देबेट प्ले, ड्रमताइजद from उदायना कर्याजद नाट्याखुसुम्जाली Tonight's assembly, Nareta, Udayakarya, Udayana, the Abjecta, Prabhupakin, the Skyar Teacher, the Kavaka, the Bauda, Buddhist Mung, Assembly, Collective, Unnamed. Act 1 The First Bikkei of Flowers Scene 1 Invocation Reading the frame, before argument, an offering. these words in two senses at once, as one speaks of flowers, and, in the same breath, of doctrine. As invocation, half-chant, may this bouquet, gathered honestly, kept fresh, never crushed to wilting though the hand presses hard upon it, be laid at the two feet of the Lord, and may my mind, in that offering, know a joy no grief can follow. A beat, then more plainly, to the whole. of the subject of inquiry. I mean, then, to make plain the nature of that Lord, that transcendent self, whose worship the learned call the road to heaven and to freedom. Seem to, why inquire at all? The assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement. Udayana. Why inquire? The Veda already sings of him. Every 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. Gesturing around the hall, look at this assembly. The follower of the Upaniads calls him pure consciousness. Kapila's people call him eternal and conscious, but not the maker. Patanjali's yogans call him a self-untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach. The Pasapadas call him free even of the rules that bind us. Sivas call him Shiva, Vyavas, Vyu, the tellers of Pura call him Grandsire of all. The ritualist calls him the one to whom the ablation is poured. The Dhegambara calls him one freed of body and of ignorance. Mtsaka calls the deities of the mantras themselves God. To see a with Mekran Arvya with Mekran Ka, not unkindly, even you, Kaurvaka, have some word for what ordinary people mean by God. Dry, 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 God, 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 Veda 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 see itself truly. So, reflection begins. 3. 5 Doubts Named. Let me be honest about what stands against me before I offer a single proof. 5 Doubts, and I will take them one by one across this bouquet. Counting on fingers, 1. There is no unseen, supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all. 2. Even without such a cause, plain human striving is enough to explain ritual and its fruit. 3. There is positive evidence that God does not exist. For 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, say them plainly, that is fair debate. Take the first, then. Scene 4. Against, no unseen cause. 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 in others. So something unseen must connect this life'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. Once the effect simply arose by accident, no cause needed at all. Scene 5, by accident? Examined and refuted. Say what you mean by accident, and I will show you it collapses into one of four things, no cause at all, self-production, production from nothing, or merely a fact about the thing's 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. A property shared by everything explains nothing about why this thing on this day. If beginning to exist whenever it does, were just each things bare nature with no cause behind it, the very question, why then and not earlier, would return endlessly and answer nothing. No, production needs a producer. Chance is not an answer, it is the question wearing a disguise. Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say, fire arises from such different means, dry grass rubbed, which earned, 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 contexts 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 an effect requires a sufficient cause, it only shows that sufficient cause can be realized more than one way. The rule survives, only your picture of it was too narrow. A murmur of ascent. 7. Unseen merit as the cause of the world's diversity. Grant all that. Why must the unseen merit and demerit, adah, be the missing cause? Why not simply say, ordinary, visible auxiliary causes, strung together, explain all the diversity we see? Because if visible chains of cause alone 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 he 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 exhaustive account without an unseen fruit survived scrutiny. Being unseen, Samadha, must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that fruit. Scene 8. Potency as an independent reality, causality of absence. Even so, must this potency you speak of be some separate reality, over and above the visible substances that act? Could not mere absence of an obstruction be doing the causal work, with nothing further needed? 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's laziness but the mason's hand. Ritual, likewise, does not merely clear a path, it lays down something, a residual potency in the agent, that ripens later into fruit. That residue is real, 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. More briskly, this is the same style of reasoning that will, in time, carry us all the way to God, an inference from effect to a cause required by the effect, nothing mystical, nothing merely asserted. Scene 9, Whom does ritual consecrate? Exposition of skia, and its critique. The essay with Macron khyayi teacher rises. Let me offer our school's account, since it touches your very question. We hold that prakthi, primordial nature, unconscious but active, woven of the three goas, undertakes all transformation of the world unaided, for the sake of Purua's liberation. No further cause, unseen merit or God, is required, prakthi alone suffices as the ground of rituals power and the world's unfolding. With respect, but firm, an elegant system, teacher, and I will grant it much. But consider, Prakti, as you describe her, is one, undifferentiated at the root, acting always by the same essential nature. A single, uniform cause, left to itself, cannot by itself explain a sequence of unlike effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn. If 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, and we are no longer very far apart, you have simply not yet given it the name I give it. Measured, we will not settle that today. But I can see the difficulty is real." Seem 10, the Kavaka is answered. The Kurvka steps forward, impatient. Enough delicacy. There is no unseen anything. What is not seen touched, or reason for 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, Carvaca, why do sincere people perform rights that cost them, that bring them no worldly return, that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation, and 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'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 use to walk from smoke to fire, that you have never seen the two joined at the source. Grudging, inference 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 Momentariness. The BAUDDHA Steps Forward. Udayana, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who richly acts today and reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit, but nothing endures. Every existent is momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears. What you call the same person tomorrow is only a causal series, each moment new. Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was sown by a moment that no longer exists at the time of reaping? If nothing endures even an instant longer than it's arising, the doer of the deed and the receiver of the fruit are, by your own account, two different, unconnected momentary existence, and moral responsibility itself dissolves. Consider, 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 illusion, no cognition of difference between two moments could stand as reliable either, since both rest on the same faculty of comparing across time. persistence root and branch, and you cannot even trust the doubt you have just raised against me, for even raising a doubt requires that the one who doubted a moment ago and the one who now speaks are the same continuing self. Quieter, we say the continuity is causal, not substantial. And a causal series sufficiently unified to carry karmic fruit across time is, in every respect that matters here, what I mean by an enduring self. self. We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, monk. But something persists. On that, this bouquet cannot yield. Seen 12, persistence and causality reconciled, the objection on the eternal self. Returning, more careful now, grant persistence, then. Still, if an object'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, any object automatically produces any effect it is capable of, always. It is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect, ascertained sometimes by watching agreement and difference, and, where that fails, as with something eternal and everywhere present, which cannot be absent anywhere to test the difference 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. Everything blue produces every blue thing's effects at all times either, a particular cause, with its particular auxiliary's present, produces its particular effect. That is simply what causality means, once stated carefully, an ordinary experience confirms it at every turn. Concluding Prayer Scene 13, concluding prayer of the first Bakae. Udyana turns again toward the unseen image, the whole quiets. That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals each soul its portion, call it Maya, since the mind cannot grasp it whole, call it Prakti, since all creation springs from it, call it Evidya, since knowledge alone dissolves it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wake devotion in my heart and stand as witness, visibly, to what I offer here. Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sava, lamp still burning, as assembly murmurs, some persuaded, some still folding their arms, the debate visibly unfinished, waiting for the second bouquet. Act 2 The second bouquet of flowers. Seem 1, why an omniscient being is still needed. 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 of that hidden causal link, so that we may act rightly at all. Stepping forward, unhurried, why reach for an omnipotent God, Udayana, when the beginningless, unbroken chain of Vedic tradition already carries that knowledge to us? Or, if you distrust an ortholous Veda, the sage Kapila and others attained omniscience through yoga and discipline alone. Neither requires your God. Because valid cognition depends on causes outside itself, and the world is not, on any account, unbroken. It dissolves, periodically, entirely. When it dissolves, the unbroken transmission of the Vedic dissolves with it, there is no teacher, no student, no sound in the air. Nor can we rest the whole edifice on sages like Kapila, whose access to hidden truths I intend to test directly before this bouquet closes. Something must renew the tradition after every dissolution. That is the thread I mean to follow now. to is validity known from within or from outside. Before you reach for God, settle a smaller question first, one my school and yours have long disputed. When a cognition arises, is its truth known automatically in 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 explain doubt, M'saka. If validity announced itself the instant a cognition arose, no cognition could ever be doubted, yet we doubt constantly, the moment a cognition doesn't resemble others already confirmed true. Volidity, like in validity, is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing, a further mark, a further inference, a test in successful action. But your external test 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. Where there is neither doubt nor a reason for doubt, belief in an object arises and 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 regress you fear threatens your intrinsic validity doctrine exactly as much as mine. You too must postulate that a cognitions, being known, is itself validly postulated, prove that, and you are inferring all over again. A Thin Smile, a Fair Hit. the thirsty man who drinks the moment he sees water. You'd say he directly perceives water'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. is not sameness. An extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remains extrinsic. Scene 3, Dream, Waking, and Maus 2 hands. Returning to the floor, then tell me how any of us tells waking from dreaming at all, Wadayana, if validity 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. That contrast is itself the criterion, it does not need to be imported from anywhere else, because waking experience applies its own standard against which the dream is measured and found wanting. The western logicians raise a sharper doubt still. A philosopher, Moore, they call him held up both his hands before a haul and said here is one hand here is another therefore external objects are real. His critics answered if your very eyes could be doubted showing us your hands proves nothing. Unbothered let them doubt on. A biological 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 non-contradiction 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, Nyaya's account of validity, known through Mark's external to bear cognition, confirmed finally by successful action carries the greater weight. Illusion and error are undeniable facts of experience. If, as Yumsaka say, everything cognized is thereby true, what, then, are illusion and error. You have no answer for that. Seem 4. Proofs that sound is not eternal. Grant me this much, then, and let me change ground. Even without your God, the Vader need not be authored at all, the Vader, and the very sound it is made of, may simply be eternal, requiring no faultless speaker and no author to answer for. Then I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing. We say, every day, that sound has stopped, the drum was struck, and now it is silent. That is a direct cognition of sound's 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, its 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, the same word, recognized again, is a flame recognized again, new fuel, 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. Quieter, the tradition will need to answer you on this at length, elsewhere. It will. For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken Veda, 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? deep sleep first, as a smaller case of the same puzzle. In dreamless sleep the self's cognition, desire, pleasure, and pain all fall silent together, yet the body's breath continues, faint, and the self wakes again undamaged. So too at cosmic dissolution, an extremely subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements, too fine to register as, world, until its final stage marks the moment and becomes the seed of new creation. 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 too 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 any tongue at all? No parent taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach. As the first scorpion arises from rotten dung, 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's dawn, gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet's 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. Turning to the hall, more somber, and do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today as it once did. Look honestly at what is already frayed. Rights once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches now 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 rites 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. Seem 7, Kapila is tested and found insufficient. Then let Kapila serve as that Noah, a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved by compassion for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost. Gently but without yielding, test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend. 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 Kapila's meditation on compassion and non-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 reach 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 is said some remember former births. It is said, but not established. A teacher who falls asleep on a holiday night and resumes yesterday's lesson that dawn proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two. And consider the very first Brahmins, at creation's dawn, 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 ready-made. It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, onniplicant being, who needs no body, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, then to multiply and proven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly. After a silence, I will carry the question forward, Ludiana. I do not yet carry your conclusion. That is exactly as debate should stand, at the end of its second round. Scene 8, concluding prayer of the second bouquet. Udayana turns once more toward the unseen image. May my heart hold fast to Shiva until life's last moment, he who, aided by the destinies of every being, builds this astonishing world again and again, and, like a magician undoing his own trick, un-makes it again, whose will runs unopposed through the whole of the cosmos, who is its final cause. On that Lord alone, let my devotion rest unmoved. Curtain falls slowly. The M'saka remains seated in thought as the lamp dims. Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted, though no one yet concedes. Act 3 The Third Bokeh of Flowers Seem one, he is not seen, therefore he is not. Stepping forward first, before Udayana can begin. You have spent two bouquets building toward a maker of the world, Udayana. I will spend this one demolishing the foundation. If God existed, He ought to be knowable, as a cow's horn is knowable by its shape and color. He is not known. Therefore He does not exist, exactly as a hare's horn does not exist, precisely because, though its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one has ever perceived 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 The hare's 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 one method you now exempt him from? By inference, which is precisely what these five bouquets exist to supply. Give 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 nothing. Seem to, sleep, the self, and what non apprehension cannot touch. Consider your own self, then, as a test case. In dreamless sleep you do not apprehend your own self, yet you do not conclude, waking, that you had 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 night, is itself proof that non-apprehension does not entail non-existence. You have refuted your own method with your own example. Recovering. Then try this instead, a conscious being ought to show bodily activity, as the sprouting sage shows the gardener's 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. Scene 3 – The Carvaka's Wager, and why it cannot be cached The kirkastepsim, sharper than before. Let me strip this down further than the atheist dares. I do not even require. Knowable but unknown, 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, Kravaka, 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 grain, by your own law, they must be judged destroyed the instant your eyes leave them. Do you believe that? Irritated, memory assures me they remain. Memory assures you of many destroyed things too, a childhood house long since fallen, a friend long dead. Memory alone cannot certify present existence. The instant you lean 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 the I itself, the very organ you're seeing, 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 live, on your account? If a thing is seen, you say its 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. In full, why inference itself survives the doubt? Grant inference some ground then, if you insist. But how is doubt about it ever finally removed? Every observed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition we haven't thought to check. That thread 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 is 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, deny 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 provision has been tested and holds, and acts. Withdrawing, unconvince but out of ground, carry it forward then. I will listen to the rest. Scene 5, comparison, and the fifth Bacchese coming test, set aside. A precise, categorical voice, one more avenue, L'diana, before you move on. Some hold comparison, cognition through observed similarity, to be its own independent means of knowledge, distinct from perception and inference. If so, a difficulty for you follows. Everything known resembles something else already known, but the God you describe has nothing else similar to him anywhere. comparison then prove his absence by that very singularity? Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor non-being, and no such third kind exists. Being and non-being exhaust the field, deny one, and you have thereby affirmed the 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. Seem 6, Verbal Testimony, and the Disputo for an Omniscient Author Returning to the floor, then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole bouquet circles back to whether the Vader needs an author at all. The vayika treats an ordinary sentences meaning as something inferred from the speaker's intention, testimony reduced to a kind of inference. My own school's Prabhakara branch goes further, only the veda, being ortholess, carries independent authority, an ordinary human sentence is trustworthy only once 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's expressive power, the sentence as meaning arrives with the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker's reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all. A child who does not yet know whether the Veda has an author still understands a 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 consider the sharper objection some raise directly against you if an omniscient creator composed even human language itself at the world's dawn, teaching the first speaker's 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's chord makes a puppet's hand point at a distant thing, and the watching child infers meaning from the pointing before 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 Non-Apprehension, Briefly Wade and Found Insufficient Examination of Postulation as an Independent Means of Knowledge Examination of Non-Apprehension as an Independent Means of Knowledge, and Further Examination of the Same and then the other, Udayana, 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 postulation against God turns out, on inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation's name, an ordinary inference I have already answered at length. Then non-apprehension once more, in its fullest form, not merely I have not seen him, which you answered in the first scene, but the deeper M.M.A. with Macron so with Macron claimed that non-apprehension is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that at silence regarding God should count as positive evidence. Patient, but visibly nearing the end of a long day's argument, trace it carefully and it collapses into perception after all. A normal, unimpaired sense produces the determinate cognition, no pot here, by apprehending the place where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences in general. And a faculty that is, at bottom, perception in another guy's inherits exactly the limit perception already had. 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 bouquet, the very first answer I gave you. A long pause, then a small, honest nod. Then I have exhausted perception, inference by non-apprehension, comparison, testimony, and postulation, and none of them has delivered me your absence. That exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time. That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole bokeh. C. Nate, closing prayer of the third bokeh. Udyana turns, one last time this act, toward the unseen image. With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshipped 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 in 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. Act 4. The Fourth Bacché of Flowers. Seem one, can omniscience even be valid cognition? One more difficulty, Udayana, 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's knowledge is 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 trustworthy author of anything, including the vader you have spent three bouquets defending. Then the flaw is in that definition, not in God. Knowing what was not known before, 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. Novelty tracks 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's cognition, being total and never in error, is as true as any cognition could be, whether or not any of it is, new to Him. Then how do you distinguish a second true seeing of the same jar 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 cannot arise from nothing. A fresh seeing of the The same jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through its own causes, not recalled from a store. And God'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. to the bid for knownness, three attempts, three failures. Let me try a different door, then. Surely cognition does something to its object, leave some mark on it. We call this mark of knownness, the property an object gains, simply by being known, of having been known. Without it, being produced of in your own inference for a divine maker 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 non-survive testing. First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a result, and that result is knownness. But an 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, the pot is known, and this phrase itself proves some new property sits on the pot. But we equally say, the pot was destroyed, of a 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 produce the cognition in the first place, nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk. Then Knowness explains nothing that cognition's own nature doesn't already explain on its own. Just so. A cognition of a pot is a cognition of a pot 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. Seem three, is cognition itself something we perceive? Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself. How do you even know a cognition has occurred, if not through some further cognition perceiving it, 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's own kitchen lets 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's direct relation to the self, in whom cognition inheres, is enough. Then answer the harder form of the question. On your school's own account, a cognition lasts barely 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 arisen, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction, to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind's next glance. Release the alternative you're gesturing toward, that each vanishing instant would need its own vanishing, knownness, to certify it, and that knownness its own further knownness to certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one level up, the same infinite regress you were trying to rescue, knownness, from in the first place. Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not multiplying it. Seen 4. What, know, means, for a being who does not act. to the floor, restless with a colder objection, grant everything so far. Still, every means of knowledge we have ever named is defined by doing something, the I acts upon light, an inference acts through a middle term, a word acts through a speaker's utterance. God, on your account, does none of this, no sense contact, no middle term, no speech act producing is knowledge. By what right, then, do you still call him a knower at all, using a word built entirely out of agency? His ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word's meaning, not the whole of how it is actually used. We call a sense faculty a means of knowledge, because it is causally involved in producing cognition. We call God a knower, 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. Broadened perception to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not perception through sense contact specifically, and God's knowing falls naturally under that wider sense, without forcing a new category into being. Scene 5. Does knowing every error make God's cognition erroneous? One last thrust, and then I yield this bouquet. 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 our errors are, in some sense, present within his own cognition too. Does that not make his cognition itself shot through with error? And if his knowledge already contains our mistakes, what uses his teaching in dispelling them? The first hint of a smile all act, you have confused the error with the knowledge of the error, friend, and that confusion is exactly the kind of mistake God's cognition, unlike ours, never makes. An illusion is false. But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion This is a false cognition, is not itself false, it is precisely the opposite, clarity about falsehood, not participation in it. God knows every error exactly as it actually is, as error, and a cognition that correctly sees error as error is, 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. A long breath, then a small bow of the head, I have carried four bouquets of doubt into this hall, Udayana, and you have met every one of them without once raising your voice. I do not yet call myself answered in full. But I no longer call myself your opponent either, only your most stubborn student. Warmly, the debate has no better outcome than that, friend. Sit, and rest a moment. What remains is not defense any longer. Scene 6, turning toward the 5th Bokeh. Three bouquets of defense are behind this hall now, 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 Bakae, the question of what it even means to call so still a being a noa. Every doubt raised 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's first move at all. That is the fifth bouquet and the summit of this whole garden. Curtain falls softly, no music of ending, only a pause, lamp turned brighter for what follows. Act 5 The Fifth Bouquet of Flowers. Scene 1 Framing the Eight. For bouquets, and I have done nothing yet but clear ground, answering doubt, refuting attack, defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending. Eight proofs stand before you, each sufficient on its own, meeting no opponents first move to exist at all, that the world is an effect, that the first motion in the atoms requires a mover, that the world is sustained, that it is destroyed, that the very conventions of word and craft required a first teacher, that the validity of the scriptural tradition demands a trustworthy source, that scripture itself testifies to its author, that even bear number, tunis, threenis, in things too small. For any of us to count, bears the mark of a counting 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. Seem to. The first proof. The world is in effect. The earth, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a pot is produced. And nothing 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 four bouquets. 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 not 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. Embodied, was never the load bearing part of my proof, you have argued against a word I did not need. 3. The Second Proof, Motion in the Atoms. Consider the atoms themselves then, before they ever became a world at all. At creation's first instant, atoms that had never before move began to move and combine. What is inert cannot move itself, a spade does not swing itself into the earth. Something conscious must impel it. Quietly, 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, different in kind from the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define bodily motion 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's great 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 cloth is destroyed only by the tearing hand, not by nothing. Destiny again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a destroyer. Destiny is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause acknowledged is not every cause excluded. If Destiny alone explained the body's 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. Meaning and destroying are, each one, affects, affects need agents. The world's vastness 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 than atoms, the very conventions by which any of us here understands the other. A potter's craft is learned from another potter, a weavers, from another weaver, a child God 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 potter with no potter to learn from, a first speaker with no language yet spoken to be taught in. Perhaps the chain simply has no first link, beginningless like the round of rebirth 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's gesture, a cord 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. Seem 6, the 6th and 7th Proofs, a trustworthy tradition, and scriptures own word. Then let me meet you on my own ground, one final time. You say the Vedic traditions validity itself proves a source behind it. But validity, on my school's teaching, needs no external guarantee, it is simply what a properly caused cognition already is. And if every cognition's validity needed a further cognition to certify it, we would face the same regress that has followed us since the second bouquet, a regress 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 Veda speaks of itself as issuing from a knowing mouth, this Veda issues from me, in every cycle anew. A collection of sentences accepted, on its own authority, by every knowledgeable person who has ever studied it, resting on nothing beyond itself, is not the same thing as an ordinary human composition whose author merely goes unnamed. A long pause, you have carried that thread across four bouquets to reach here. I recognize the shape of the argument, even if I have not yet fully laid down my own. That is honest, and it is enough for tonight. Seven, an interlude, who commands, when scripture commands. One thread you have not yet pulled, Udayana. Scripture does not merely describe it commands. The self should be known. 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, know the self, commands 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's meaning, make desire the meaning of the command, and desire becomes both cause and effect of itself, circular and empty. What a command actually conveys is a speaker's intention that the listener act, and an intention requires, by its very grammar, an intender. You should do this, 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. Scene 8, the 8th proof, what counts the atoms? And last, the strangest end, 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 aggregation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at But a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly. Tunes 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 diet its tunes, if no finite creature has ever counted a single atom in its life? Quietly, after a long silence, only an omniscient counter. an omniscient counter. Eight Proofs, Friend, The World as Effect, The Atom's First Motion, Its Sustaining, Its Destruction, The First Teaching of Every Word We Speak, The Validity of an Ancient Trust, Scripture's Own Testimony to its Source, and Now Number itself, Present in What None of Us Could 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 haul 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 petal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole in your hand. 9. Direct knowing, beyond argument. And is there truly no way to know him except by chains of reasoning, Udayana, eight proofs, each requiring a hall like this one and an evening like this one to walk through? Gentler now, the debate visibly closing, reasoning is not the only door. Yogan'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 stilling 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 faith tonight. I have only walked you, proof by proof, toward the point where faith and reason arrive at the same door from different roads. Scene 10, final prayer of the whole bouquet. 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 nostrils 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 halls, entirely. A Long 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 Sava. Quietly, as the curtain falls, five bouquets, eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone out all evening. The debate ends here. Whether it ends settled is, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries it out the door.

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