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Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11

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asr-draft

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en (0.995277)

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1:09:29

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1. 0:03–0:15Setting an assembler hall sabah in Mithila, open-pillared, a lamp burning. Scholars of many schools have gathered, as was the custom, to test one proposition against all comers.
2. 0:15–0:23Act 1. The first bouquet of flowers. Of arguments concerning the cause of the world.
3. 0:23–0:29Scene 1 Invocation Stage curtain rises on the Lamplit Sabar.
4. 0:29–0:36Udayana stands, folds his hands toward an unseen image, and speaks first not to the assembly
5. 0:36–0:38but as an offering dot-b-slash.
6. 0:38–0:45Before argument and offering understand these words in two senses at once, as one speaks
7. 0:45–0:49of flowers and in the same breath of doctrine.
8. 0:49–0:57Udayana, as in vocation, half-jump, a beat, then more plainly, to the hall, definition
9. 0:57–0:59of the subject of inquiry.
10. 0:59–1:04I mean, then, to make plain the nature of that lord, that transcend itself, those words
11. 1:04–1:07of the learned call erode to heaven and to freedom.
12. 1:07–1:14Seen to, why inquire at all, the assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement dot bishlash.
13. 1:14–1:15Udayana, why inquire?
14. 1:15–1:17The Vedder already sings of him.
15. 1:17–1:22tradition in this hall already has its god under a different name. What doubt remains to open an
16. 1:22–1:28inquiry? None, and that is exactly my point, friend, and exactly my problem. Look at this assembly.
17. 1:28–1:33The follower of the Upanishads calls him pure consciousness. Kekelar backslash as people
18. 1:33–1:39call him eternal and conscious. But not the maker. Patanjali backslash as Joggins call
19. 1:39–1:44him a self untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach. The pass reporters call
20. 1:44–1:48him free even of the rules that bind us. Shavers call him chiever,
21. 1:48–1:54Beishnarers, Vishnu, the tellers of Purirana, call him grand sire of all. The ritualist calls
22. 1:54–1:59him the one to whom the oblation is poured. The Digambarer calls him one free to body and
23. 1:59–2:04a vignance. The Mimamsarker calls the deities of the mantras themselves God. Even you,
24. 2:04–2:10Karv Garkar, have some word for what ordinary people mean by backslash god dot bix-lash.
25. 2:10–2:13A word, not a belief.
26. 2:13–2:15Even a word is data, friend.
27. 2:15–2:20My point stands, everyone in this hall already agrees that something is meant by backslush
28. 2:20–2:25guide backslush, and disagrees completely on what, that is not the ground for silence,
29. 2:25–2:28that is the very ground that demands inquiry.
30. 2:28–2:31We have heard enough from Scripture, it is time, not a reason.
31. 2:31–2:38The Veddo itself says, first hear, then reflect, and the elders add, through hearing, through
32. 2:38–2:44reasoning through the quiet practice of meditation. A soul comes at last to seal itself truly.
33. 2:44–2:47So reflection begins.
34. 2:47–2:50Scene 3. Five Doubts Named
35. 2:50–2:55Let me be honest about what stands against me before I offer a single proof. Five doubts
36. 2:55–2:57and I will take them one by one across this bouquet.
37. 2:57–3:03One, there is no unseen supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all.
38. 3:03–3:07Two, even without such a cause playing human striving is enough to explain ritual and
39. 3:07–3:11its fruits. Three, there is positive evidence that God does not exist.
40. 3:11–3:16Four, even if some proof of God is offered, that very proof will turn out invalid. Five,
41. 3:16–3:20no, authoritative proof of God exists at all, valid or not.
42. 3:20–3:24Good. Say them plainly. That is fair debate. Take the first, then.
43. 3:24–3:29Scene four, against, backslash, no, unseen cause, backslash.
44. 3:29–3:32Look at how differently people act. Two men, same circumstance.
45. 3:32–3:361. Choose opposite paths. 2. One turns to ritual.
46. 3:36–3:393. One to indulgence. 4. One to renunciation.
47. 3:39–3:435. That difference in tendency has causes, and the chain of those causes has no first link
48. 3:43–3:49we can point to. And whatever a man reads, he reads in his own person, not another backslash s.
49. 3:49–3:55So something unseen must connect this life backslash s action to a fruit received beyond it.
50. 3:55–4:00This world, thick with every kind of suffering unequally dealt out, cannot be uncaused.
51. 4:00–4:06An uncaused thing either exists always or never. It does not arise here, cease there,
52. 4:06–4:11on no schedule at all. Yet plainly this world of ours does arise and cease on a schedule none of us
53. 4:11–4:17set, therefore some cause beyond the scene. Unless the effects simply arose by accident,
54. 4:17–4:24no cause needed at all. Seeing five, backsash by accident, backsash examined and refuted.
55. 4:24–4:29Say what you mean by backslesh, accident, backslesh, and I will show you it collapses
56. 4:29–4:35into one of four things, no cause at all. Self-production, production from nothing,
57. 4:35–4:40or merely a fact about the thing backslush as own nature. None of the four survives. Every effect
58. 4:40–4:45that comes to be has a clear earlier limit. The moment before which it was not, and a clear later
59. 4:45–4:51limit, the moment after which it will not be, as it is. Nothing marks that limit at that moment,
60. 4:51–4:57except a cause acting then. But suppose the moment itself needs no further explanation. A thing
61. 4:57–5:00Everything simply has the property of beginning to exist on this day rather than another the
62. 5:00–5:03way space simply has the property of being eternal.
63. 5:03–5:08A property shared by everything explains nothing about why this thing on this day.
64. 5:08–5:12If backslash beginning to exist whenever it does backslash or just each thing backslash
65. 5:12–5:15as bare nature with no cause behind it.
66. 5:15–5:20The very question backslash why then and not really your backslash would return endlessly
67. 5:20–5:21and answer nothing.
68. 5:21–5:24No, production needs a producer.
69. 5:24–5:25Chance is not an answer.
70. 5:25–5:28It is the question wearing it as skies.
71. 5:28–5:32Scene 6 on Cause, General and Particular
72. 5:32–5:36Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say, fire arises from such different means, dry
73. 5:36–5:40grass rubbed, wood churned, sunlight gathered through a lens.
74. 5:40–5:45If cause determines effect strictly, how does one effect come from three, unlike origins?
75. 5:45–5:50Because causal power is known through observed correlation in each distinct context, not
76. 5:50–5:53Not proclaimed once for all context at once.
77. 5:53–5:58Grinding, churning, focusing, three different causal complexes, each independently verified
78. 5:58–6:01to yield fire under its own conditions.
79. 6:01–6:06Nothing in that variety damages the rule that in effect requires a sufficient cause.
80. 6:06–6:10It only shows that backslash, a sufficient cause backslash can be realized more than
81. 6:10–6:11one way.
82. 6:11–6:12The rule survives.
83. 6:12–6:15Only your picture of it was too narrow.
84. 6:15–6:17a murmur of a sin.
85. 6:17–6:22Scene 7 Unseen Merit as the Cause of the World Backslash S Diversity
86. 6:22–6:27Granola, why must have Unseen Merit and Demerit, Adresha, be the missing cause?
87. 6:27–6:33Why not simply say ordinary, visible, auxiliary causes strong together explain all the diversity
88. 6:33–6:34we see?
89. 6:34–6:38Because of visible chains of cause, alum explained everything, no one would trouble to perform
90. 6:38–6:44a single unrewarded ritual, and yet people do expecting nothing here only hereafter.
91. 6:44–6:46Ask why they persist, not for pleasure.
92. 6:46–6:52The unbeliever seeks pleasure more directly and skips the ritual, not for reputation alone.
93. 6:52–6:57That fails to explain private devotion no one sees, not because elders deceive the young,
94. 6:57–7:02for the elders themselves keep the observance, and a deceiver does not usually deceive himself
95. 7:02–7:03first.
96. 7:03–7:06Some cunning founder inventing it all for his own gain, then the alone should have
97. 7:06–7:11grown rich and free, giving nothing away, yet the pattern runs the other direction
98. 7:11–7:13entirely the sincere giveaway what they have.
99. 7:13–7:18way Gloss of Account without an unseen throat survives scrutiny. Something unseen, some
100. 7:18–7:23Ed Richter must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that throat.
101. 7:23–7:29Scene 8 Potency as an independent reality causality of absence.
102. 7:29–7:34narrator reads the section title, Udayana and the object to work through a longer technical
103. 7:34–7:39passage condensed here to its spine-dopk slash.
104. 7:39–7:43Even so, must this backslash potency backslash you speak of be some separate reality over
105. 7:43–7:48and above the visible substances that act could not mere absence of an obstruction be
106. 7:48–7:51doing the causal work with nothing further needed.
107. 7:51–7:56Absence can remove a hindrance, it cannot, by itself, produce a positive effect to make
108. 7:56–8:02bricks into a house you need not only the absence of the builder backslush s-laziness,
109. 8:02–8:07but the mason backslush s-hand, ritual likewise, does not merely clear a pair.
110. 8:07–8:12lays down something, a residual potency in the agent, that ripens later into
111. 8:12–8:18frout, that residue is real, though unseen, its reality is inferred exactly as we
112. 8:18–8:22infer fire from smoke, by its necessary connection with an effect that has no
113. 8:22–8:26other adequate explanation. This is the same style of reasoning that will, in
114. 8:26–8:31time, carry us all the way to God and inference from effect to a cause
115. 8:31–8:36required by the effect. Nothing mystical, nothing merely asserted.
116. 8:36–8:45Scene 9 Whom does ritual consecrate? Exposition of Samkéer and its critique. The Samkéer teacher rises.
117. 8:45–8:52Let me offer our school backslash as account. Since it touches your very question, we hold that
118. 8:52–8:59Prakriti, primordinal nature, unconscious but active woven of the three gooners, undertakes all
119. 8:59–9:05transformation of the world unaided for the sake of Pyrrhasha backslash as liberation.
120. 9:05–9:13no further cause. Unseen merit or God is required. Prakriti alone suffices as the ground of ritual
121. 9:13–9:20backslash s power and the world backslash s unfolding. In elegant system, Teacher and I will
122. 9:20–9:26rant it much, but consider Prakriti as you describe her as one undifferentiated at the route,
123. 9:26–9:33acting always by the same essential nature, a single uniform cause, left to itself cannot
124. 9:33–9:39by itself explain the sequence of unlike effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn
125. 9:39–9:43if she produces successively. Something must account for the order of that succession,
126. 9:43–9:50and that something is exactly the kind of unseen, individuating cause I am arguing for. Grant me that
127. 9:50–9:55much. We are no longer very far apart. You have simply not yet given it the name I give it.
128. 9:55–9:59We will not settle that today, but I concede the difficulty is real.
129. 9:59–10:00No.
130. 10:00–10:01Scene 10.
131. 10:01–10:03The Carvaka is answered.
132. 10:03–10:08The Carvaka steps forward in patient.xlash.
133. 10:08–10:09Enough delicacy.
134. 10:09–10:11There is no unseen anything.
135. 10:11–10:17What is not seen, touched, or reasoned from direct perception is simply not there to reason
136. 10:17–10:18about.
137. 10:18–10:19Ritual is habit.
138. 10:19–10:23The next world is a story told to keep the poor obedient.
139. 10:23–10:24Then answer me plainly.
140. 10:24–10:29Carvaka, why do sincere people perform rites that cost them, that bring them no worldly
141. 10:29–10:35return that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation, still they persist, quietly,
142. 10:35–10:36without display.
143. 10:36–10:42You have called it habit, but habit needs a first cause too, and every account you offer,
144. 10:42–10:48pleasure, custom, deception, a founder backflush s cunning, collapses the moment it is tested,
145. 10:48–10:50as I have already shown this assembly.
146. 10:50–10:53What is not directly seen is not thereby proven false.
147. 10:53–10:57It is simply what must be established by inference, which is the very tool you yourself
148. 10:57–11:02used to work from smoke to fire, though you have never seen the two joined at the source.
149. 11:02–11:06Influence, I permit. Faith, I do not.
150. 11:06–11:10Then let us continue by inference alone. That is all I have asked of anyone in this hall.
151. 11:10–11:17Scene 11, the border and the doctrine of Momenturinus. The border steps forward, Dotpa slash.
152. 11:17–11:23Udea, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who ritually acts today
153. 11:23–11:27and reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit.
154. 11:27–11:34Nothing endures. Every existent is momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears.
155. 11:34–11:38What you call backslash, the same person backslash tomorrow,
156. 11:38–11:45is only a causal series, each moment new. Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was
157. 11:45–11:50owned by a moment that no longer exists at the time of rebelling? If nothing endures, even an
158. 11:50–11:54instant longer than its arising, the doer of the deed and the receiver of the
159. 11:54–11:58fruited ore, by your own account, two different, unconnected momentary
160. 11:58–12:02existence, and moral responsibility itself dissolves.
161. 12:02–12:06Consider it too, how ordinary recognition works. I see a jar today, and know it as
162. 12:06–12:11the same jar I saw yesterday, not a new jar resembling the old, if that
163. 12:11–12:15recognition of identity were always illusion, no cognition of difference
164. 12:15–12:19between two moments could stand as reliable either, since both rest on
165. 12:19–12:22on the same faculty of comparing and crosstown.
166. 12:22–12:24Deny persistence, route, and branch,
167. 12:24–12:26and you cannot even trust the doubt
168. 12:26–12:28you have just raised against me
169. 12:28–12:30for even raising a doubt requires
170. 12:30–12:32that the one who doubted a moment ago
171. 12:32–12:33and the one who now speaks
172. 12:33–12:35are the same continuing self.
173. 12:35–12:39We say the continuity is causal, not substantial.
174. 12:39–12:41An ecological series sufficiently unified
175. 12:41–12:43to carry karmic fraud across time is
176. 12:43–12:45in every respect that matters here,
177. 12:45–12:47what I mean by an enduring self.
178. 12:47–12:52We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, month, but something persists.
179. 12:52–12:54On that, this bouquet cannot yield.
180. 12:54–13:01Scene 12, persistence and causality reconciled, deal objection on the eternal self.
181. 13:01–13:02Grant persistence then.
182. 13:02–13:06SILF, if an object backsash, s very nature, is to be a cause.
183. 13:06–13:11Must it not cause its effect always, everywhere, the moment it exists, the way blue is always
184. 13:11–13:12blue.
185. 13:12–13:16Yet an eternal, all-pervading self is not seen to produce pleasure and pain at every
186. 13:16–13:17moment.
187. 13:17–13:21can causality and an eternal self be reconciled at all.
188. 13:21–13:26Because causality is not backslush, any object automatically produces any effect it is capable
189. 13:26–13:32of, always dot backslash it is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect,
190. 13:32–13:37ascertained sometimes by watching agreement and difference, where that gales as with
191. 13:37–13:41something eternal and everywhere present, which cannot be absent anywhere to test
192. 13:41–13:45the backslush difference backslush side, ascertained instead through a reason that
193. 13:45–13:51establishes the causal relation directly. The self produces pleasure and pain only in conjunction
194. 13:51–13:57with its proper auxiliary conditions, mind, body, the ripening of that same unseen potency
195. 13:57–14:02we spoke of earlier. Not everything blue produces every blue thing backslash s affects at all
196. 14:02–14:08times either a particular cause with its particular auxiliaries present produces its particular
197. 14:08–14:14effect that is simply what causality means. One stated carefully, an ordinary experience
198. 14:14–14:17confirms it at every turn.
199. 14:17–14:18CONCLUDING PRAYER
200. 14:18–14:20Scene 13.
201. 14:20–14:22CONCLUDING PRAYER OF THE FIRST BOUKEI
202. 14:22–14:28Udayana turns again toward the unseen image, the hall-quiet's dot-biss-slash.
203. 14:28–14:33That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals, each soul its portion, call it mire,
204. 14:33–14:38since the mind cannot grasp it whole, call it prayer-creedy, since all creation springs
205. 14:38–14:40from it.
206. 14:40–14:45Avalabdavidir, since knowledge loam dissolves it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole
207. 14:45–14:50disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wait devotion in my heart,
208. 14:50–14:54stand as witness visibly to what I offer here."
209. 14:54–15:00Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sabbat, lamp still burning. As assembly murmurs,
210. 15:00–15:05some persuaded, some still folding their arms. The debate visibly unfinished, waiting
211. 15:05–15:10for the second bouquet dot b-slash.
212. 15:10–15:17Act 2. The second bouquet of flowers, of arguments concerning valid cognition, the eternity
213. 15:17–15:23of the Vedda, and the possibility of a new creation. New voice joining this act, the
214. 15:23–15:28Mimum Saka, a Vedic ritualist scholar Curtis Button yielding, who holds that the Vedda
215. 15:28–15:34is awfulous and eternal, and that cognition proves its own truth without external help
216. 15:34–15:52We have established, across the first bouquet, that an unseen destiny governs the fruit of
217. 15:52–15:58every act, but destiny itself must have some cause, and no creature among us can perceive
218. 15:58–16:00that cause directly.
219. 16:00–16:05No one acts purposefully toward what lies wholly beyond cognition, so some extraordinary, omniscient
220. 16:05–16:10being must exist, able to hand down to us true knowledge that is not causally linked,
221. 16:10–16:13so that we may act rightly at all.
222. 16:13–16:15Why reach for an omnipotent God?
223. 16:15–16:19You Deanna, when the beginningless and broken chain of Vedic tradition already carries
224. 16:19–16:24that knowledge to us, or if you distrust in authorless veda, the sage Kapila and
225. 16:24–16:28others attain omniscience through yoga and discipline alone, neither requires your
226. 16:28–16:29God.
227. 16:29–16:35This valid cognition depends on causes outside itself and the world is not on any account
228. 16:35–16:36unbroken.
229. 16:36–16:39It dissolves periodically entirely.
230. 16:39–16:44Scene 2 is validity known from within or from outside.
231. 16:44–16:48Before you reach for God, settle a smaller question first.
232. 16:48–16:50One might say, and yours have long disputed.
233. 16:50–16:55When a cognition arises, is its truth known automatically, and the very arising of
234. 16:55–16:56it?
235. 16:56–17:00to cognize something at all simply is to take it as true.
236. 17:00–17:05What later proves false was, on inspection, never truly a cognition.
237. 17:05–17:11Then explained out, Mimmsaka. If validity announced itself the instant a cognition arose,
238. 17:11–17:16no cognition could ever be doubted, yet we doubt constantly.
239. 17:16–17:21The moment a cognition dos and backslash, T-resemble others already confirmed true.
240. 17:21–17:32Validity, like invalidity, is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing a further mark, a further inference, a test in successful action.
241. 17:32–17:44But your box-lush, external-test box-lush invites its own regress. If a second cognition is needed to certify the first, a third is needed to certify the second, and so on without end.
242. 17:44–17:51Not so, because most of the time, certifying validity is simply unnecessary.
243. 17:51–17:56Where there is neither doubt, nor a reason for doubt, belief in an object arises, and we
244. 17:56–18:00act on it without any separate act of certification.
245. 18:00–18:05Only where doubt genuinely arises does the further inference come in, and there, it
246. 18:05–18:10terminates, because the redress you fear threatens your backslash, intrinsic validity backslash,
247. 18:10–18:13doctrine exactly as much as mine.
248. 18:13–18:19You too must postulate that a cognition backslash s backslash being known backslash is itself
249. 18:19–18:25validly postulated, prove that, and you are inferring all over again.
250. 18:25–18:26Affair it.
251. 18:26–18:31Consider the thirsty man, who drinks the moment he sees water.
252. 18:31–18:37You backslash d say he directly perceives water backslash s power to quench thirst, since
253. 18:37–18:39he acts without hesitation.
254. 18:39–18:40He does not.
255. 18:40–18:45That power is inferred, instantly and unconsciously, from past experience.
256. 18:45–18:52The way desire itself is born from a swift, silent inference that a certain action gets a certain result.
257. 18:52–18:54Swiftness is not same as...
258. 18:54–19:00An extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remains extrinsic.
259. 19:00–19:01Scene 3.
260. 19:01–19:06Dream, waking, and more backslash, S2 hands.
261. 19:06–19:10Then tell me how any of us tells waking from dreaming at all, you may honor.
262. 19:10–19:20If malidity 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.
263. 19:20–19:30And the moment you wake, the two states stand in sharp, undeniable opposition, the dim memory of the dream against the vivid immediacy of waking.
264. 19:30–19:43That contrast is itself the criterion. It does not need to be imported from anywhere else, because waking experience supplies its own standard against which the dream is measured and found wanting.
265. 19:43–19:49The western legion reymer sharpen out still. A philosopher, Muur, may call him, held up
266. 19:49–19:54both his hands before a haul and said, Maxash, here is one hand, here is another, therefore
267. 19:54–19:59external objects are real not Maxash, his critics answered, if your merry eyes could
268. 19:59–20:02be doubted, showing us your hands proves nothing.
269. 20:02–20:08Let them doubt on. A mere logical possibility that evidence might someday surface against
270. 20:08–20:12But the fact is not the same as evidence that has surfaced.
271. 20:12–20:17Push that skepticism to its root, and you land on the law of uncontradiction itself.
272. 20:17–20:23Call it a tautology, if you like, empty of content, but even the skeptic must stand on
273. 20:23–20:27it to say anything at all, including his doubt.
274. 20:27–20:31I do not need certainty invulnerable to every conceivable future.
275. 20:31–20:34I need what any reasonable inquiry needs.
276. 20:34–20:37The balance of evidence, honestly weighed.
277. 20:37–20:42And on that balance, NiaBaxash, S-account of validity, known through Mark's external
278. 20:42–20:49to bear cognition, confirmed by successful action, carries the greater weight.
279. 20:49–20:52Illusion and error are undiable facts of experience.
280. 20:52–20:58If, as U-Bim-Msa could say, everything cognized is thereby true, what, then, are illusion
281. 20:58–20:59and error?
282. 20:59–21:02You have no answer for that.
283. 21:02–21:03Scene 4.
284. 21:03–21:06Proofs that sound is not eternal.
285. 21:06–21:10Hunt me this much, then, and let me change ground.
286. 21:10–21:13Even without your god, the VEDA need not be authored at all.
287. 21:13–21:18The VEDA, and the very sound it is made of, may simply be eternal, requiring no faultless
288. 21:18–21:21speaker and no author to answer for.
289. 21:21–21:26There I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing.
290. 21:26–21:30We say, every day, backslash, that sound has stopped.
291. 21:30–21:34Backslash, the drum was struck, and now it is silent.
292. 21:34–21:39It is a direct cognition of sound backslash as destruction.
293. 21:39–21:43Sound cannot have merely moved elsewhere, being formless.
294. 21:43–21:48It cannot have been covered over, for covering belongs to things with shape.
295. 21:48–21:53It has not merely grown too faint for us, for the same excuse would prove that a shattered
296. 21:53–21:57pot has not really broken, only become invisible.
297. 21:57–22:03But there cannot perceive that absence directly, it substratum, ether, cannot be perceived
298. 22:03–22:04at all.
299. 22:04–22:16We 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 beat its locus.
300. 22:16–22:19And listen to the sound itself.
301. 22:19–22:26Trises, Falls, Loudons, Soffins, One and the same eternal thing cannot bear opposed qualities at once.
302. 22:27–22:29What you call backslash, the same word,
303. 22:30–22:36recognized again backslash, is a flame recognized again, new fuel, new light, each moment,
304. 22:36–22:38called by one name out of habit.
305. 22:39–22:45Production and destruction, not eternity, is what your own ear tells you, if you will trust it.
306. 22:45–22:50The tradition will need to answer your dissuadlings, elsewhere.
307. 22:50–22:57It will. For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken feather, is produced,
308. 22:57–23:03and what is produced can be lost. Which returns us to the question, who restores it, each
309. 23:03–23:06time the world dissolves, and forgets.
310. 23:06–23:11Scene 5. How can a new creation even begin?
311. 23:11–23:17I grant dissolution during dissolution on your own account nothing moves nothing acts the sky itself
312. 23:17–23:23stand empty and still what then could possibly initiate a new creation out of absolute stillness
313. 23:24–23:31consider deep sleep first and a smaller case of the same puzzle in dreamless sleep the self-backslash
314. 23:31–23:38s cognition desire pleasure and pain all fall silent together yet the body backslash s breath
315. 23:38–23:46continues, faint, and the self-wakes again damaged. So to that cosmic dissolution, an extremely
316. 23:46–23:51subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements, to find a register as backslash,
317. 23:51–23:56the world backslash, until its final stage marks the moment, and becomes the seed of
318. 23:56–24:02new creation. It is not that a day must always be preceded by a other day of its
319. 24:02–24:07own kind, the first day of the monsoon is preceded by the last day of summer,
320. 24:07–24:09not by another rainy day.
321. 24:09–24:14So to the first day of a new creation is preceded by dissolution, not by another day of an old
322. 24:14–24:15world.
323. 24:15–24:21And the first human beings, the first Brahmins, the first speakers of editor not all, no parent
324. 24:21–24:25taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach.
325. 24:25–24:31As the first scorpion rises from Ra and Dun, not from a scorpion parent, and only later
326. 24:31–24:36generations breed true, so the supreme lord may himself take the forms of teacher and
327. 24:36–24:43pupil at the world backslash s-ton gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet backslash s-hand
328. 24:43–24:48toward a distant object and in that gesture teach the very first convention of word and
329. 24:48–24:49meaning.
330. 24:49–24:55From that first instruction the whole chain, podder to podder, weaver to weaver, teacher
331. 24:55–25:01to student, descend unbroken until the next dissolution breaks it again.
332. 25:01–25:06The long decline, and why scripture needs restoring.
333. 25:06–25:11And do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today as it once did.
334. 25:11–25:14Look honestly at what has already frayed.
335. 25:14–25:19Right's once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches how survive,
336. 25:19–25:23if at all, through a single branch, imperfectly kept.
337. 25:23–25:29Dharma once stood on four legs, austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, charity.
338. 25:29–25:37fell. Two legs remained. Knowledge fell. One leg, charity, bears the whole weight now,
339. 25:37–25:39and even that leg is wounded.
340. 25:39–25:42Then say plainly what you are building toward.
341. 25:42–25:48That scripture is not self-sustaining. Its authority depends on the feather, not on
342. 25:48–25:53the general good conduct of virtuous people copying one another, for if virtuous conduct
343. 25:53–25:58alone were sufficient to make an act obligatory, no scriptural injunction would be needed
344. 25:58–26:04at all, and yet we all know rights that have lapsed entirely, with no living witness, that
345. 26:04–26:11must one day be restored, not merely remembered. Restoration needs a knower, and faith in scripture
346. 26:11–26:18merely recognizes truth, it cannot manufacture it, once the original cause is gone.
347. 26:18–26:23Scene 7. Capilla is tested, and found insufficient.
348. 26:23–26:29Let Kapila serve us that nor a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved by compassion
349. 26:29–26:34for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost.
350. 26:34–26:39Test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend.
351. 26:39–26:43Meditation may indeed be a means of knowing what is otherwise hidden, I do not deny it
352. 26:43–26:49wholesale, but meditation does not automatically yield knowledge the instant it is practiced.
353. 26:49–26:53It needs some other means to confirm what it has found.
354. 26:53–26:59What confirms capillabac slash ass meditation on compassion and on violence, whose fruits
355. 26:59–27:01no one has ever seen?
356. 27:01–27:06A coward meditates fruitfully on a snake only because he has met a snake before.
357. 27:06–27:11No one has met the fruit of yoga directly, in this life or between two lives, for the
358. 27:11–27:16body that acts in this birth, and the body that reaps the fruit in the next are not
359. 27:16–27:22even the same body, and without some experience link-joining the two, the connection cannot
360. 27:22–27:24be verified at all.
361. 27:24–27:27It is said some remember former births.
362. 27:27–27:30It is said, but art established.
363. 27:30–27:36A teacher, who falls asleep on a holiday night, and resumes yesterday backslash SS an at-a-don
364. 27:36–27:42proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two.
365. 27:42–27:46and consider the very first promise at creation backslash s-torn.
366. 27:46–27:51By what memory could they have known their own lineage if no one had yet been born to
367. 27:51–27:53remember it?
368. 27:53–27:58No power of travel between worlds is proven either that might have carried settlers in
369. 27:58–28:00bearing a caste system readymade.
370. 28:00–28:06It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, omnipotent being
371. 28:06–28:17Who needs nobody, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, and to multiply unproven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly.
372. 28:18–28:23I will carry the question forward, Udayana. I do not yet carry your conclusion.
373. 28:23–28:28That is exactly as debate should stand, at the end of its second round.
374. 28:28–28:33Scen8. Concluding prayer of the second bouquet.
375. 28:33–28:38You day on the terms, one small award the unseen image.bx
376. 28:38–28:42May my heart hold fast to sheave until life.bx
377. 28:42–28:46As last moment, he who, aided by the destinies of every being,
378. 28:46–28:49builds this astonishing world again and again,
379. 28:49–28:54and, like a magician doing his own trick, un-makes it again,
380. 28:54–28:59Who's will runs unopposed through the whole of the cosmos? Who is its final cause?
381. 28:59–29:03On that lord alone, let my devotion rest unmoved.
382. 29:04–29:10Curtain falls slowly. A mimum-soccer remains seated in thought as the lamp dims.
383. 29:10–29:16Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted. Oh no one yet concedes.buck slash.
384. 29:17–29:21Act 3. A third bouquet of flowers.
385. 29:21–29:26of arguments refuting every alleged proof that God does not exist.
386. 29:26–29:38The atheist, nastiker, joins the flawless act, not a school so much as a stance, whatever cannot be caught by some means of knowledge, he holds, cannot be real.
387. 29:38–29:49The carmarker, the mimmsarker, and the V.I.S.H.E.S.H.I.K.A. are precise, Category-Logition Cousin Tanaya also speak.buckslash.
388. 29:49–29:56Scene 1, Backslash, he is not seen, therefore he is not Backslash.
389. 29:56–29:57Curtain rises.
390. 29:57–30:04The lamp is trimmed higher, this bouquet is the hall Backslash, S most contested Dot Backslash.
391. 30:04–30:08You have spent 2 bouquets building to Watermaker of the World, you may honor.
392. 30:08–30:11I will spend this one demolishing the foundation.
393. 30:11–30:15If God existed, he ought to be knowable, as a cow Backslash, S horn is knowable by
394. 30:15–30:17its shape and color.
395. 30:17–30:23is not known. Therefore he does not exist, exactly as a hairback slash s-horn does not exist,
396. 30:23–30:27precisely because, though its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one could ever
397. 30:27–30:28perceive one.
398. 30:28–30:34A clean argument, and cleanly wrong at its first step. Your inference works only, where
399. 30:34–30:40the object was already granted to be perceptible, the hairback slash s-horn failed the test
400. 30:40–30:45of perception it was always eligible to sit. God was never claimed by any theist
401. 30:45–30:51in this hall to be an object of ordinary perception at all. You cannot fault an unseen thing for
402. 30:51–30:57failing a test it was never entered into. Then how is he known, if not by the one method
403. 30:57–31:02you now exempt him from? By inference, which is precisely what these
404. 31:02–31:08five bouquets exist to supply. Save your strongest objection for the fifth, when the inferences
405. 31:08–31:14themselves stand before you. For now I only clear the ground, not a prehension of
406. 31:14–31:18Everything ever claimed to be apprehensible proves a thing.
407. 31:18–31:25Seen to sleep, the self, and what not apprehension cannot touch.
408. 31:25–31:27Consider your own self, then, as a test case.
409. 31:27–31:32In dreamless sleep you do not apprehend your own self, yet you do not conclude, on waking,
410. 31:32–31:34that you have ceased to exist.
411. 31:34–31:39Why does the same silence applied to God not equally prove his absence?
412. 31:39–31:45in sleep, the causes that would produce self-cognition are simply not assembled, the mind has withdrawn
413. 31:45–31:51from the senses, not because the self has vanished, but because the instrument of noticing it has
414. 31:51–31:57gone quiet. The very fact you rely on, that no one doubts their own continued existence
415. 31:57–32:04through a dreamless eye, is itself proof that unapprehension does not entail unexistence.
416. 32:04–32:08You have refuted your own method with your own example.
417. 32:08–32:12Then try this instead, a consciously ignored to show bodily activity as the sprouting seed
418. 32:12–32:15shows the God of the box as shash hand.
419. 32:15–32:18No divine activity is seen before a single sprout appears.
420. 32:18–32:20No activity, no agent.
421. 32:20–32:23A pot needs an embodied potter.
422. 32:23–32:27The world does not thereby need an embodied maker of the identical kind.
423. 32:27–32:32The self persists, unmoving, through sleep, through fainting, through the stillness of
424. 32:32–32:44Poison 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.
425. 32:45–32:50Scene 3. The Carvaca backslash, S-Wager, and why it cannot be cached.
426. 32:51–32:55The Carvaca Steps in, sharper than before. Backslash.
427. 32:55–32:59Let me strip this man for the money I see his pants.
428. 32:59–33:03I do not even require backslash, noble button, no backslash as your loophole.
429. 33:03–33:04My rule is simpler.
430. 33:04–33:07What is not known in any sense does not exist.
431. 33:07–33:08What is known exists.
432. 33:08–33:10God is never known.
433. 33:10–33:11Finished.
434. 33:11–33:15Then finish it, Carvaka, and see where it leads you.
435. 33:15–33:20On your rule, the moment you step outside your own house, you no longer perceive
436. 33:20–33:24your wife, your children, your stored brain, by your own law.
437. 33:24–33:28They must be judged destroyed the instant your eyes leave them.
438. 33:28–33:30Do you believe that?
439. 33:30–33:32Memory assures me they remain.
440. 33:32–33:35Memory assures you have many destroyed things too.
441. 33:35–33:40A childhood house long, since fallen, a friend long dead.
442. 33:40–33:43Memory alone cannot certify present existence.
443. 33:43–33:48The instant you leave on memory to save your family from your own rule, you have conceded
444. 33:48–33:50exactly what I need.
445. 33:50–33:53Unapprehension does not prove unexistence.
446. 33:53–34:07Consider the die itself. The very organ you're backslash, seeing backslash, depends on is never itself seen, yet you do not doubt it exists. Your rule, followed honestly, destroys your own instrument of doubting.
447. 34:07–34:13Ordinary conduct does not need certainty. It runs on probability, general agreement, tested by use.
448. 34:13–34:17Then where does probability live, on your account?
449. 34:17–34:21If a thing is seen, you say it's existance is certain.
450. 34:21–34:24If unseen, its absence is certain.
451. 34:24–34:28You have left no middle ground for probability to stand on at all.
452. 34:28–34:34You have described a doctrine with no room for the very mode of belief you say it rests on.
453. 34:34–34:38Scene 4. Why inference itself survives the doubt?
454. 34:38–34:44Rent inference some round, then, if you insist. But how is that about it ever finally removed?
455. 34:44–34:52Every absorbed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition we haven't backslash the thought to check. Let threat never closes.
456. 34:52–35:02It 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,
457. 35:02–35:09and that very capacity is inference, extended from present time through hour, day, and season.
458. 35:09–35:16You cannot use inference to attack inference without borrowing the very tool you are trying to disqualify.
459. 35:16–35:22And practically, outends where a counterfactual would trap the doubter in his own contradiction,
460. 35:22–35:27deny that cause, and effect are reliably connected, and the very act of doubting,
461. 35:27–35:31It's self-effect could never have arisen in you at all.
462. 35:31–35:36A reasonable mind does not chase every conceivable exception forever.
463. 35:36–35:41It follows a reason whose perversion has been tested and holds and acts.
464. 35:42–35:45Carry it forward, then. I will listen to the rest.
465. 35:45–35:52Scene 5. Comparison and the 5th UK Backslash S-Coming Test. Set aside.
466. 35:53–35:56One more avenue, you Diana, before you move on.
467. 35:56–36:03Some old backslash, comparison backslash, cognition from observed similarity, to be its own independent
468. 36:03–36:07means of knowledge, distinct from perception and inference.
469. 36:07–36:13If so, a difficulty for your followers, everything known resembles something else already known,
470. 36:13–36:19but the God you describe as nothing else similar to many were, could comparison then prove
471. 36:19–36:22in absence, by that very singularity?
472. 36:22–36:29Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor unbeing, and no such third
473. 36:29–36:31kind exists.
474. 36:31–36:37Being and unbeing exhaust the field, then I won, and you have thereby affirmed that other.
475. 36:37–36:42Similarity is simply a property of things that already are, sorted under one, or the other
476. 36:42–36:48of those two categories, it needs no independent status, and therefore yields no independent
477. 36:48–36:52weapon against a being who happens, by his nature.
478. 36:52–36:58be singular. Uniqueness is not a defect that argument can weaponize. It is simply a fact
479. 36:58–37:00some subjects have, and others don't.
480. 37:00–37:07C6. Verbal Testimony, and the dispute over an omniscient author.
481. 37:07–37:12Then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole book is a closed-back to
482. 37:12–37:17whether the Veda needs an author at all. The Veshe Shaka treats an ordinary sentence
483. 37:17–37:24S-box slash S-meaning are something inferred from the speaker box slash S-intention, testimony reduced to a kind of inference.
484. 37:24–37:31My own school box slash S-prubhakara branch goes further, only the Veda, being authorless, car in independent authority,
485. 37:31–37:37an ordinary human sentence is trustworthy only one S-inference has certified the speaker reliable.
486. 37:37–37:42Both positions ask testimony to do more work than it needs to.
487. 37:42–37:59The moment you already know a word backslash s expressive power, the sentence backslash s meaning arrives with the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker backslash s reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all.
488. 37:59–38:08A child, who does not yet know whether the Vedic has an author still understands the Vedic sentence perfectly well the moment he hears it.
489. 38:08–38:13That alone shows understanding does not wait on settling authorship first.
490. 38:13–38:18Testimony is its own means of knowledge, standing beside perception and inference,
491. 38:18–38:21not smuddled inference wearing a disguise.
492. 38:21–38:25Then consider the sharper objection some raise directly against you.
493. 38:25–38:31If an omniscient creator composes even human language itself at the world-buck slash s-ton,
494. 38:31–38:36teaching the first speakers word by word, how could such teaching ever get off the ground
495. 38:36–38:40with no shared word yet existing between teacher and pupil to teach with.
496. 38:41–38:46As I have already shown you, in the second bouquet, through gesture before word,
497. 38:46–38:52exactly as a puppeteer backslash, S chord makes a puppet backslash, S hand point at a distant thing,
498. 38:52–38:58and the watching child infers meaning from the pointing before any word is spoken at all.
499. 38:58–39:02Instruction need not presuppose language completed.
500. 39:02–39:06It can begin language, gesture first, word following,
501. 39:06–39:09I do not ask you to accept this today.
502. 39:09–39:15I only ask you to know this at the objection, however sharp it sounds, has already been met.
503. 39:15–39:22Scene 7. Postulation and not apprehension, briefly weighed and found insufficient.
504. 39:23–39:28Narrator reads the remaining section titles together, briskly, as you day honor answers
505. 39:28–39:33each in turn, the pace quickens here, a flurry rather than a dual dot backslash.
506. 39:33–39:38Examination of postulation as an independent means of knowledge.
507. 39:38–39:45Examination of non-apprehension as an independent means of knowledge, and further examination of the same.
508. 39:45–39:51One undended other, you may honor, since you have answered comparison and testimony.
509. 39:51–39:55Postulation, first, the inference forced on us when a known fact makes no sense otherwise,
510. 39:55–40:02does postulation not, in some case, force us to explain the world without God, and so crowd Him out.
511. 40:02–40:11Show me the fact that only makes sense without a maker, and I will answer it directly, but no one in this hall has yet produced one.
512. 40:11–40:22Every alleged case of backslash, postulation against God backslash, turns out, an inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation backslash's name,
513. 40:22–40:26and ordinary inference I have already answered at length.
514. 40:26–40:43Then no apprehension, once more, in its fullest form, not merely Baxash, I have not seen him Baxash, which you answered in the first scene, but the deeper demands acclaim that no apprehension is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that its silence regarding God should count as positive evidence.
515. 40:43–41:01Trace it carefully and it collapses into perception after all. A normal, unimpaired sense produces the determinate cognition backslash, no pot here backslash by apprehending the place where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences in general.
516. 41:01–41:07general. And the faculty that is, at bottom. Perception in other guys inherits exactly
517. 41:07–41:13the limit perception already had. It can report the absence only of what it was ever fit
518. 41:13–41:19to detect in the first place. God was never within that fitness. The silence proves
519. 41:19–41:25a thing new. It only restates, for the third time this UK, the very first answer I gave
520. 41:25–41:26you.
521. 41:26–41:35Then I have exhausted perception, inference and apprehension, comparison, testimony and postulation, and none of them has delivered me your absence.
522. 41:35–41:44Not exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time. That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole bouquet.
523. 41:44–41:48C-Nate. Closing prayer of the third bouquet.
524. 41:48–41:55Uday on a terms, one last time this act, toward the unseen image dot back slash.
525. 41:55–42:02With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshiped across every tradition in this hall under a hundred names,
526. 42:02–42:09whose quiet festival of bliss no rival joy equals, whose reality no perception can catch, and discard,
527. 42:09–42:20no 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.
528. 42:20–42:26Curtain falls. The atheist remains standing a moment longer than the rest of the assembly
529. 42:26–42:31before he, too, sits.
530. 42:31–42:35Act 4. The Fourth Bukkei of Flowers.
531. 42:35–42:41Of arguments concerning God as Noah, and the true nature of cognition.
532. 42:41–42:47The shortest Bukkei, and the most inward turning, having secured that God exists,
533. 42:47–42:53cannot be disproved, the whole now asks what it even means to call an unmoving, all knowing
534. 42:53–42:59being a backslash, no a backslash, at all. The Mimmsaka carries most of the argument
535. 42:59–43:02this act dot backslash.
536. 43:02–43:06Scene 1. Can Omniscience Even Be Valid Cognition?
537. 43:06–43:12Curtain rises on the same lamplit subar, later still. Udayana looks tired in the
538. 43:12–43:19a good way, a debate deep into his case, not worn down by it.buckslash.
539. 43:19–43:23One more difficulty, you're the armor, and it strikes at the root of everything you
540. 43:23–43:24have built.
541. 43:24–43:25You call God omniscient.
542. 43:25–43:31But valid cognition, by definition, must know something not already known, otherwise memory
543. 43:31–43:35itself would count as a valid means of knowledge, which no one accepts.
544. 43:35–43:39Godbuckslash is knowledge in total, nothing is ever new to him.
545. 43:39–43:44If nothing is ever new to him, on your own definition, nothing he knows can count as
546. 43:44–43:45valid knowledge at all.
547. 43:45–43:50And if his knowledge is not valid, he has no trust when they author a benefit, including
548. 43:50–43:53the meda you have spent rebuking defendant.
549. 43:53–43:57Then the flaw is in that definition, not in God.
550. 43:57–44:02Backslash, knowing what was not known before backslash, cannot be what makes a cognition
551. 44:02–44:03true.
552. 44:03–44:05It is both too narrow and too wide.
553. 44:05–44:06Too narrow.
554. 44:06–44:12See the same jar twice, and the second seeing is every bit as true as the first, though nothing
555. 44:12–44:13is new in it.
556. 44:13–44:18Too wide, an illusion may present something never seen before, and still be false.
557. 44:18–44:22Novel detracts neither truth nor falsehood.
558. 44:22–44:27What makes a cognition true is simply this, that it corresponds to how the thing actually
559. 44:27–44:28is.
560. 44:28–44:34By that measure, God-max-sh's cognition, being total and never in error, is as true
561. 44:34–44:40as any cognition could be, whether or not any of it is backslash, new backslash, to him.
562. 44:40–44:46Then how do you distinguish a second tree seeing of the same jar from mere memory? We do not
563. 44:46–44:51call memory a means of knowledge. Because memory depends entirely on a prior cognition
564. 44:51–44:57to borrow its content from, it can authorize from a thing. A fresh seeing of the same
565. 44:57–45:03jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through its own causes, not recalled
566. 45:03–45:09from a store. And God-backslash-S case is simpler still than either. His cognition of
567. 45:09–45:15the whole universe is a single, self-identical act, dependent on no other cognition before
568. 45:15–45:21it, needing no second glance at anything. Call it neither new, nor old, it simply
569. 45:21–45:24is, entire, all at once.
570. 45:24–45:31Scene 2. A bid for backslash, known as backslash, 3 attempts, 3 failures.
571. 45:31–45:38Let me try a different door then. Surely cognition does something to its object, leaves a mark on it.
572. 45:38–45:46We call this mark backslash, known as backslash. The property and object gains, simply by being known, of having been known.
573. 45:46–45:52Without it, backslash, being produced backslash, in your own inference for a divine maker becomes untrustworthy,
574. 45:52–45:58because an agent, who leaves no trace on what he touches, can hardly be said to know his own materials.
575. 45:58–46:03Three ways to argue for such a mark and unsurvive testing.
576. 46:03–46:09First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a
577. 46:09–46:12result, and that result is knownless.
578. 46:12–46:16But a narrow shot at the empty sky produces no result in the sky.
579. 46:16–46:18Cognition may be like that arrow.
580. 46:18–46:21Real motion, no mark left behind.
581. 46:21–46:26Second, that we say backslash, the pot is known backslash, and this phrase itself
582. 46:26–46:32proves some new property sits on the pot. But we equally say backslash, the pot was destroyed
583. 46:32–46:39backslash of a pot that no longer exists to receive any property at all. Language describing
584. 46:39–46:44a relation to an act does not, by itself, prove a real residue in the object.
585. 46:44–46:51Third, that the very fact we can talk about cognition proves some perceptible trace it leaves.
586. 46:51–46:56But the causes that let us talk about a cognition are the very same causes that
587. 46:56–47:02produced the cognition in the first place, nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk.
588. 47:02–47:06Then Onus explains nothing but cognition box-ish,
589. 47:06–47:09a soul nature-dolson box-ish, T.R.E.B. explain on its own.
590. 47:10–47:11Just so.
591. 47:11–47:15A cognition of a pot is a cognition of a pot by its own nature,
592. 47:15–47:21exactly as an effort to lift a stone is an effort concerning that stone by its own nature,
593. 47:21–47:25without either one depositing some third thing into what it touches.
594. 47:26–47:30Scene 3. Is cognition itself something we perceive?
595. 47:30–47:35Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself.
596. 47:35–47:43How do you even know a cognition has a card, if not through some form of cognition perceiving it, endlessly, one behind the next?
597. 47:43–47:45Not endlessly, directly.
598. 47:45–47:54The 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.
599. 47:54–48:03On the next moment, when a further cognition of that same object arises, the mind turns and knows the earlier cognition determinately.
600. 48:03–48:10The way a first fire recognized in one backslash's own kitchen lets one recognize by the same mark,
601. 48:10–48:15a second fire glimpse later on a distant hill through its smoke.
602. 48:15–48:21Cognition is not itself perceived through some second, separate cognition standing outside it.
603. 48:21–48:27The mind backslash S-direct relation to the self, in whom cognition inheres, is enough.
604. 48:28–48:33Then answer the harder form of the question. On your school backslash S-own account, a cognition
605. 48:33–48:39last barely two or three moments before it perishes. If it is that brief, how does it last long
606. 48:39–48:45enough both to reveal its object and to be caught itself by the mind looking back at it?
607. 48:45–48:50And does that fleeting cognition, in its second moment, still grasp the very same object it
608. 48:50–48:56crossed and the first, or has the object, and a tendent, already changed.
609. 48:56–49:01The same object, held across both moments, nothing stranger is required than granting
610. 49:01–49:08that a cognition, once a reason, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction,
611. 49:08–49:14to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind-backslash-s-next
612. 49:14–49:20plans. Chase the alternative you backslash, re-gesturing to ward, that each vanishing
613. 49:20–49:26instant would need its own vanishing backslash, known as backslash, to certify it, and that
614. 49:26–49:31known as its own further known as to certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one
615. 49:31–49:36level up, the same infinite regress you were trying to rescue backslash, known as
616. 49:36–49:42backslash, from in the first place. Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not
617. 49:42–49:44multiplying it.
618. 49:44–49:45Scene 4.
619. 49:45–49:51What backslash, no backslash means, for a being who does not act.
620. 49:51–49:53Grant everything so far.
621. 49:53–49:55Still, every backslash means of knowledge backslash.
622. 49:55–49:58We have ever named this defined by doing something.
623. 49:58–50:01Did I act upon light, an inference acts through a middle term,
624. 50:01–50:04a word acts through a speaker backslash, a deterrence.
625. 50:04–50:08God, on your account, does none of this, no sense contact,
626. 50:08–50:11no middle term, no speech act producing his knowledge.
627. 50:11–50:17By what right? Then, do you still call him a no-er at all, using a word built entirely out of agency?
628. 50:17–50:25Because ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word backslash, s meaning, not the whole of how it is actually used.
629. 50:25–50:33We call a sense faculty a backslash, means of knowledge backslash, because it is causally involved in producing cognition.
630. 50:33–50:39We call God a backslash, noor backslash, for a different, equally legitimate reason.
631. 50:39–50:46Cognition simply resides in him, as a permanent feature of what he is, without needing to be produced by anything at all.
632. 50:46–50:54A person can be a noor without, at this instant, being an agent of anything, knowing does not require doing.
633. 50:54–51:03Nor need I claim his cognition is some fifth, undiscovered means of knowledge alongside perception, inference, testimony, and the rest.
634. 51:03–51:21Broden backslash, Perception backslash, to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not perception through sense contact specifically, and God backslash s-knowing falls naturally under that wider sense, without forcing a new category into being.
635. 51:21–51:27Scene 5. Thus burying every error make God backslash s-cognition erroneous.
636. 51:27–51:30One last thrust, and then I yield the spookay.
637. 51:30–51:36If God is omniscient, he knows every false belief every creature have ever held, every illusion,
638. 51:36–51:39every mistake and inference, every dream.
639. 51:39–51:44But then the objects of all are error-mar, in some sense, present within their own cognition
640. 51:44–51:45too.
641. 51:45–51:48Does that not make the cognition itself short for an error?
642. 51:48–51:52And if the knowledge already contains our mistakes, what use is the teaching in dispelling
643. 51:52–51:53them?
644. 51:53–51:58You have confused the error with the knowledge of the error, friend, and that confusion is
645. 51:58–52:05exactly the kind of mistake God-back-slash-es cognition, unlike ours, never makes.
646. 52:05–52:06An illusion is false.
647. 52:06–52:12But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion, back-slash-es is a false cognition.
648. 52:12–52:15Back-slash-es is not itself false.
649. 52:15–52:17It is precisely the opposite.
650. 52:17–52:21Clarity about falsehood, not participation in it.
651. 52:21–52:28God knows every error exactly as it actually is, an error, and a cognition that correctly sees error as error is,
652. 52:28–52:32by the very definition we settled at the start of this bouquet. True.
653. 52:32–52:39Far from undermining his teaching, that is the only thing that makes his teaching worth anything at all.
654. 52:39–52:44He does not merely hold our mistakes alongside his own truths, he sees them as mistakes,
655. 52:44–52:51which is precisely what we, still caught inside them, cannot yet do for ourselves.
656. 52:51–52:58I have carried 4 bouquets of doubt into this hall, you de-ah-ah, and you have met everyone of them without once raising your voice.
657. 52:58–53:06I do not yet call myself an sudden fool, but I no longer call myself your opponent either, only your most stubborn student.
658. 53:06–53:15The debate has no better outcome than that, friend. Sit, and rest a moment. What remains is art defense any longer.
659. 53:15–53:19Scene 6. Turning toward the 5th bouquet.
660. 53:19–53:24No concluding prayer is given for this bouquet in the source text.
661. 53:24–53:29The surviving page is moved directly from the discussion of God backslash, s-knowledge
662. 53:29–53:32of error into the great positive proofs.
663. 53:32–53:36The rater marks the term, instead.backslash.
664. 53:36–53:41Three bouquets of defense are behind this hall now, the doubt that no unseen cause
665. 53:41–53:48exists, the doubt that ritual needs no God, the claim that God can be disproved outright,
666. 53:48–54:01In this fourth and shortest bouquet, the question of what it even means to call so still a being a backslash, no a dot backslash, every doubt raised against him has been met and turned.
667. 54:01–54:08One task remains, greater than all the rest, not merely to defend the citadel, but to build it.
668. 54:08–54:15Eight proofs, standing on their own feet, requiring no opponent backslash, s first move at all.
669. 54:15–54:19That is the fifth bouquet and the summit of this whole garden.
670. 54:19–54:26Curtain falls softly, no music offending, only a pause, lamp trimmed brighter for what
671. 54:26–54:27follows.buckslash.
672. 54:27–54:28Act 5.
673. 54:28–54:30The Fifth Bouquet of Flowers.
674. 54:30–54:31The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence.
675. 54:31–54:32The summit of the debate.
676. 54:32–54:33You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof.
677. 54:33–54:34The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence.
678. 54:34–54:35The summit of the debate.
679. 54:35–54:36You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof.
680. 54:36–54:37The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence.
681. 54:37–54:38The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence.
682. 54:38–54:39The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence.
683. 54:39–54:40The summit of the debate.
684. 54:40–54:41You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof.
685. 54:41–54:48longer merely answers, he builds, proof after proof, each one standing on its own feet.
686. 54:48–54:56The atheist, the kavaka, the mimamsaka, the samkhya teacher, the border, and the vishishikas
687. 54:56–55:02are all present in the hall, no longer opposing in turn, but listening as one assembly to
688. 55:02–55:06a case finally being made in full dot book slash.
689. 55:06–55:07Scene 1.
690. 55:07–55:09Framing the aid.
691. 55:09–55:16The lamp burns steady. You day on the stand at the center of the hall, and for once no
692. 55:16–55:20one interrupts him at the start.buckslash.
693. 55:20–55:26For buccase, and I have done nothing yet, but clear drowned, answering doubt, refuting
694. 55:26–55:32attack, defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending. Eight proofs stand
695. 55:32–55:40Eight proofs stand before you, each sufficient on its own, needing no opponent backslash as first move to exist at all.
696. 55:40–55:47At the world is an effect. At the first motion in the atoms requires a mover. At the world is sustained.
697. 55:47–55:53But it is destroyed. At the very conventions of word and craft require the first teacher.
698. 55:53–55:58At the validity of the scriptural tradition demands a trustworthy source.
699. 55:58–56:01That scripture itself testifies to its author.
700. 56:01–56:10That even their number, two-ness, three-ness, in things too small for any of us to count, bears the mark of accounting mind.
701. 56:10–56:15Test each one as harshly as you have tested everything else I have said this evening.
702. 56:15–56:20I ask only that you test them one at a time, on their own ground.
703. 56:20–56:25Begin, then. I have not conceded easily tonight, and I will not begin now.
704. 56:25–56:29Good. That is exactly how this should end.
705. 56:29–56:34Scene 2. The first proof. The world is an effect.
706. 56:34–56:41The earth, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a part is produced.
707. 56:41–56:47And a thing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, the world has a maker.
708. 56:47–56:54Then that make a fuzzabody, as every potter does, and if he fuzzabody, he is not the bodiless god you have been building toward for 4BuCase.
709. 56:55–56:59Press that objection, and watch it fall through your own hands.
710. 56:59–57:07Either you are claiming God fuzzabody, in which case you have already granted he exists, and merely quibble about his shape,
711. 57:07–57:14or you are claiming the world was not made by an embodied being, and conclude from that alone that it was not made at all,
712. 57:14–57:18Which contradicts the very inference you are supposedly answering.
713. 57:18–57:24A general cause need not share every feature of the particular causes we happen to have seen before.
714. 57:24–57:28Fire is inferred from smoke, regardless of which fuel burned.
715. 57:28–57:33A maker is inferred from a made world, regardless of whether that maker wears a body.
716. 57:33–57:38Backslash, embodied backslash, was never the load-bearing part of my proof.
717. 57:38–57:41You have argued against a word I did not need.
718. 57:41–57:46Scene 3. The Second Proof. Motion in the Atoms.
719. 57:46–57:53Consider the Atoms themselves, then, before they ever became a back-sash, world-back-sash,
720. 57:53–57:59at all. At creation back-sash is first instant, Atoms that had never before moved began to
721. 57:59–58:05move, and combine. What is inert cannot move itself, a spider does not swing itself
722. 58:05–58:09into the Earth. Something conscious must impale it.
723. 58:09–58:16Destiny alone might account for that first motion, without any conscious impeller at all.
724. 58:16–58:21Destiny is one cause among several needed, teacher, not a cause that crowds out all the
725. 58:21–58:22others.
726. 58:22–58:28An inert thing, precisely because it is inert, needs a locus of consciousness to set it moving,
727. 58:28–58:30exactly as a spade needs a hand.
728. 58:30–58:36You may call the specific motion of a living body backslash, different in kind backslash,
729. 58:36–58:42From the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define backslash, bodily motion backslash,
730. 58:42–58:48any way you choose, and you will find the definition already assumes exactly what I am arguing.
731. 58:48–58:51A special motion, produced by a conscious agent.
732. 58:51–58:57You cannot use the very thing under dispute to disqualify the inference that establishes
733. 58:57–58:58it.
734. 58:58–58:59Scene 4.
735. 58:59–59:01The Third and Fourth Proofs.
736. 59:01–59:04Sustaining and Destruction.
737. 59:04–59:10The world, immense and heavy as it is, does not fall, as a bird-back slash s-rate weight
738. 59:10–59:14does not fall, sustained by its own effort in flight.
739. 59:14–59:19Something sustains the whole of it, moment to moment, the way effort sustains a living
740. 59:19–59:20body.
741. 59:20–59:25And when that same world is later destroyed, down to the smallest indivisible pair of
742. 59:25–59:32atoms, destruction, too, requires an agent capable of it, precisely as class is destroyed
743. 59:32–59:35only by the tearing hand, not by nothing.
744. 59:35–59:40Bestinia again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a
745. 59:40–59:42destroyer.
746. 59:42–59:47Bestinia is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause of knowledge is not every cause
747. 59:47–59:48excluded.
748. 59:48–59:54If Bestinia alone explained the body backslash as sustenance, effort itself would have no
749. 59:54–59:59work left to do in keeping a living creature upright, which is plainly false, as any
750. 59:59–1:00:02Any of us standing in this hall could tell you.
751. 1:00:02–1:00:05Sustaining and destroying are, each one, effects.
752. 1:00:05–1:00:07Effects need agents.
753. 1:00:07–1:00:16The world-back-slash-ass-mastness is no exemption from a rule that governs every smaller thing we have ever watched rise and fall.
754. 1:00:16–1:00:21Scene 5. A Fifth Proof. Who taught the first word?
755. 1:00:21–1:00:24Consider something closer to home, Anathems.
756. 1:00:24–1:00:29The very conventions by which any of us here understands the other.
757. 1:00:29–1:00:32A Potter backslash S-Craft is learned from a other Potter.
758. 1:00:32–1:00:34A Weaver backslash S.
759. 1:00:34–1:00:41From a other Weaver, a child learns the alphabet from a teacher, who learned it from a teacher before.
760. 1:00:41–1:00:45Trace that chain back far enough, and you reach a first link.
761. 1:00:45–1:00:51A first potter with no potter to learn from, a first speaker with no language yet spoken to be taught in.
762. 1:00:52–1:00:59Perhaps the chain simply has no forced link, beginningless, like the round of re-bought it self.
763. 1:01:00–1:01:05The cycle of creation and dissolution is beginningless, monk, I do not dispute that.
764. 1:01:06–1:01:14But within any one cycle, at its own fresh dawn, there are no fallen or ordinary human beings yet available to have originated anything.
765. 1:01:14–1:01:21Something must set the very first convention moving, in each new beginning, the way a puppeteer
766. 1:01:21–1:01:27backsash s-gesture, a chord-pulled, a hand-pointed, teaches a watching child the meaning of a
767. 1:01:27–1:01:31word before any word has yet been spoken between them.
768. 1:01:31–1:01:37That first teacher need not keep a body permanently, scripture itself records a being who takes
769. 1:01:37–1:01:43form again and again, precisely to renew what would otherwise be lost.
770. 1:01:43–1:01:506. The 6 and 7 Proofs. A trustworthy tradition. And scripture backslash.
771. 1:01:50–1:01:51A zone word.
772. 1:01:51–1:01:57Then let me meet you on my own round, one final time. You say the Vedic tradition backslash
773. 1:01:57–1:02:03is validity itself proves a source behind it. But validity, on my school backslash,
774. 1:02:03–1:02:08is teaching, needs no external guarantee, it is simply what a properly caused cognition
775. 1:02:08–1:02:09already is.
776. 1:02:09–1:02:15And if every cognition backslash s-malidity needed a further cognition to certify it,
777. 1:02:15–1:02:20we would face the same regress that has followed us since the second bouquet, a regress I answered
778. 1:02:20–1:02:23then and answer again now.
779. 1:02:23–1:02:29A tradition this vast, this table, held by learned people across every generation, is
780. 1:02:29–1:02:33not the kind of thing a single limited person invents from a thing.
781. 1:02:33–1:02:39It requires, at its root, one being of the requisite excellence to originate it truly.
782. 1:02:39–1:02:44Scripture does not merely imply such a source, it names one.
783. 1:02:44–1:02:49In passage after passage, unprompted by any need for praise, the meta speaks of itself
784. 1:02:49–1:02:52and issuing from a knowing mouth.
785. 1:02:52–1:02:57Backslash this meta issues from me, in every cycle a new dot-backslash, a collection of
786. 1:02:57–1:03:03sentences accepted, on its own authority, by every knowledgeable person who has ever
787. 1:03:03–1:03:08studied it, resting on nothing beyond itself, is not the same thing as an ordinary human
788. 1:03:08–1:03:12composition whose author merely goes unnamed.
789. 1:03:12–1:03:15You have carried that thread across four bookcase to reach here.
790. 1:03:15–1:03:21I recognize the shape of the argument, even if I have not yet fully laid down my own.
791. 1:03:21–1:03:25That is honest, and it is enough for tonight.
792. 1:03:25–1:03:26Scene 7.
793. 1:03:26–1:03:27An interlude.
794. 1:03:27–1:03:31Who commands, when scripture commands?
795. 1:03:31–1:03:34One thread you have not yet pulled, you be honored.
796. 1:03:34–1:03:36Scripture does not merely describe, it commands.
797. 1:03:36–1:03:45Backsash, the self should be known not backsash, what is a command, if not simply an action, or a desire, already present in the listener without need of any speaker behind it.
798. 1:03:46–1:03:47Neither will serve.
799. 1:03:47–1:04:01Not action, for backsash, know the self backsash, command nothing that moves through space at all, and any command reduced to mere action collapses into every ordinary sentence describing a person walking to market.
800. 1:04:01–1:04:08Not desire either, for the very desire to actorize is only from cognizing the command backslash
801. 1:04:08–1:04:14s meaning, make desire the meaning of the command, and desire becomes both cause and effect
802. 1:04:14–1:04:17of itself, circular and empty.
803. 1:04:17–1:04:22What a command actually conveys is a speaker backslash s intention that the listener act,
804. 1:04:22–1:04:27and an intention requires, by its very grammar, a Nintendo.
805. 1:04:27–1:04:29You should do this.
806. 1:04:29–1:04:34Is meaningless without someone whose desire expresses concern in you.
807. 1:04:34–1:04:39Every injunction in scripture examined honestly down to its grammar, point smack to a speaker
808. 1:04:39–1:04:42standing behind the verb.
809. 1:04:42–1:04:43C-Nate.
810. 1:04:43–1:04:45The eight proof.
811. 1:04:45–1:04:47What counts the atoms?
812. 1:04:47–1:04:52And last, the strangest and, to my mind, the most delicate of the eight.
813. 1:04:52–1:05:00A pair of atoms has a certain magnitude. A triad, a magnitude far greater, too great to be explained by atomic size alone,
814. 1:05:00–1:05:09for if mere multiplication of atoms explained it, two atoms together should already show that same gross size, and they plainly do not.
815. 1:05:09–1:05:19Something beyond bare aggregation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly.
816. 1:05:19–1:05:22Tunis is not a property lying passively in the pair.
817. 1:05:22–1:05:25It arises through an act of enumeration.
818. 1:05:25–1:05:30And atoms are, by their very nature, invisible to every one of us.
819. 1:05:30–1:05:38Whose enumeration, then, gives the diadids Tunis, if no phyite creature has ever counted a single atom in its life.
820. 1:05:38–1:05:40Only a omniscient counter.
821. 1:05:40–1:05:42Only a omniscient counter.
822. 1:05:42–1:06:04Eight proofs, friend, the world as effect, the atoms backslash, first motion, its sustaining, its destruction, the first teaching of every word we speak, the validity of an ancient trust, scripture backslash, its own testimony to its source, and our number itself, present in what a of us could ever count alone.
823. 1:06:04–1:06:08I do not claim any single one of these, standing by itself.
824. 1:06:08–1:06:13Could not be picked at by a patient enough opponent across another whole evening,
825. 1:06:13–1:06:17you have shown me tonight exactly how patient this hall can be.
826. 1:06:17–1:06:23I claim only that eight independent lines, converging on the same conclusion from eight
827. 1:06:23–1:06:28different directions no one of them borrowed from the others, are not eight coincidences.
828. 1:06:28–1:06:33That is what a bouquet is, in the end, not one breakable flower,
829. 1:06:33–1:06:40But many gathered together, so that even if one pedal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole in your hand.
830. 1:06:41–1:06:45See line, direct nerring, beyond argument.
831. 1:06:45–1:06:55And there's there truly no way to know him except by chains of reasoning, Yudiana, it proofs, each requiring a haul like this one, and an evening like this one to walk through.
832. 1:06:55–1:06:58Reasoning is not the only door.
833. 1:06:58–1:07:05Yagin's report-direct inner knowing of him, the way a dream sometimes shows a mind-things-no-external-sense
834. 1:07:05–1:07:08supplied it, not every dream is mere memory replayed.
835. 1:07:08–1:07:11Some carry the texture of genuine experience.
836. 1:07:11–1:07:16Through discipline, through the stealing of ordinary restlessness, that same kind of
837. 1:07:16–1:07:21unmediated knowing is said to be possible for God as it is, in smaller measure, for
838. 1:07:21–1:07:23the vividness of a true dream.
839. 1:07:23–1:07:27I have not asked this hall to take that on-face tonight.
840. 1:07:27–1:07:33I have only walked you, proof by proof, toward the point where faith and reason arrive at
841. 1:07:33–1:07:36the same door from different roads.
842. 1:07:36–1:07:37Scene 10.
843. 1:07:37–1:07:40Final Prayer of the Hole Bukke.
844. 1:07:40–1:07:45You day on the terms, for the last time in this drama, toward the unseen image at
845. 1:07:45–1:07:47the head of the hall.
846. 1:07:47–1:07:55The whole assembly, objector, mimmsaka, kawaka, samkhya, boda, vashishika, atheist, falls
847. 1:07:55–1:07:58quiet around him.buckslash.
848. 1:07:58–1:08:05If even this, eight proofs, offered honestly, tested honestly, cannot move a mind, that mind
849. 1:08:05–1:08:09is stone, and no bouquet of arguments will soften stone.
850. 1:08:09–1:08:12So I do not pray for victory here.
851. 1:08:12–1:08:18I pray instead, may this bouquet of reasoning perfume both ostrals equally, may it satisfy
852. 1:08:18–1:08:24the theist who came already believing, and, in its own time, reach even the atheist who
853. 1:08:24–1:08:26came to break it.
854. 1:08:26–1:08:31And if it cannot do even that much, then let it rest simply as an offering.
855. 1:08:31–1:08:37Gathered honestly, kept fresh, laid without expectation at the feet of the Lord of Teachers,
856. 1:08:37–1:08:42who alone knows whether the mind that hears it tonight will find its way home sooner,
857. 1:08:42–1:08:48or only later, or by some other road than this hall backslash s, entirely.
858. 1:08:48–1:08:49Along steel-ness.
859. 1:08:49–1:08:54Then, one by one, unhurried, the assembly rises.
860. 1:08:54–1:08:56The atheist is the last to stand.
861. 1:08:56–1:09:02The proscenium curtain, crimson and gold, the same curtain that rose on the first
862. 1:09:02–1:09:07Bukkei, begins its final, slow descent over the lamplit sub-R.buck slash.
863. 1:09:08–1:09:13Five Bukkeis, eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone out all evening.
864. 1:09:14–1:09:15The debate ends here.
865. 1:09:16–1:09:23Whether it ends settled in, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries it out the door.
866. 1:09:23–1:09:26End of Act 5, end of the play.

Plain text

Setting an assembler hall sabah in Mithila, open-pillared, a lamp burning. Scholars of many schools have gathered, as was the custom, to test one proposition against all comers. Act 1. The first bouquet of flowers. Of arguments concerning the cause of the world. Scene 1 Invocation Stage curtain rises on the Lamplit Sabar. Udayana stands, folds his hands toward an unseen image, and speaks first not to the assembly but as an offering dot-b-slash. Before argument and offering understand these words in two senses at once, as one speaks of flowers and in the same breath of doctrine. Udayana, as in vocation, half-jump, a beat, then more plainly, to the hall, definition of the subject of inquiry. I mean, then, to make plain the nature of that lord, that transcend itself, those words of the learned call erode to heaven and to freedom. Seen to, why inquire at all, the assembly stirs, a murmur of half-agreement dot bishlash. Udayana, why inquire? The Vedder already sings of him. tradition in this hall already has its god under a different name. What doubt remains to open an inquiry? None, and that is exactly my point, friend, and exactly my problem. Look at this assembly. The follower of the Upanishads calls him pure consciousness. Kekelar backslash as people call him eternal and conscious. But not the maker. Patanjali backslash as Joggins call him a self untouched by affliction, who wears a body only to teach. The pass reporters call him free even of the rules that bind us. Shavers call him chiever, Beishnarers, Vishnu, the tellers of Purirana, call him grand sire of all. The ritualist calls him the one to whom the oblation is poured. The Digambarer calls him one free to body and a vignance. The Mimamsarker calls the deities of the mantras themselves God. Even you, Karv Garkar, have some word for what ordinary people mean by backslash god dot bix-lash. A word, not a belief. Even a word is data, friend. My point stands, everyone in this hall already agrees that something is meant by backslush guide backslush, and disagrees completely on what, that is not the ground for silence, that is the very ground that demands inquiry. We have heard enough from Scripture, it is time, not a reason. The Veddo itself says, first hear, then reflect, and the elders add, through hearing, through reasoning through the quiet practice of meditation. A soul comes at last to seal itself truly. So reflection begins. Scene 3. Five Doubts Named Let me be honest about what stands against me before I offer a single proof. Five doubts and I will take them one by one across this bouquet. One, there is no unseen supernatural cause behind our fate in the next world at all. Two, even without such a cause playing human striving is enough to explain ritual and its fruits. Three, there is positive evidence that God does not exist. Four, even if some proof of God is offered, that very proof will turn out invalid. Five, no, authoritative proof of God exists at all, valid or not. Good. Say them plainly. That is fair debate. Take the first, then. Scene four, against, backslash, no, unseen cause, backslash. Look at how differently people act. Two men, same circumstance. 1. Choose opposite paths. 2. One turns to ritual. 3. One to indulgence. 4. One to renunciation. 5. That difference in tendency has causes, and the chain of those causes has no first link we can point to. And whatever a man reads, he reads in his own person, not another backslash s. So something unseen must connect this life backslash s action to a fruit received beyond it. This world, thick with every kind of suffering unequally dealt out, cannot be uncaused. An uncaused thing either exists always or never. It does not arise here, cease there, on no schedule at all. Yet plainly this world of ours does arise and cease on a schedule none of us set, therefore some cause beyond the scene. Unless the effects simply arose by accident, no cause needed at all. Seeing five, backsash by accident, backsash examined and refuted. Say what you mean by backslesh, accident, backslesh, 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 backslush as own nature. None of the four survives. Every effect that comes to be has a clear earlier limit. The moment before which it was not, and a clear later limit, the moment after which it will not be, as it is. Nothing marks that limit at that moment, except a cause acting then. But suppose the moment itself needs no further explanation. A thing Everything 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 backslash beginning to exist whenever it does backslash or just each thing backslash as bare nature with no cause behind it. The very question backslash why then and not really your backslash would return endlessly and answer nothing. No, production needs a producer. Chance is not an answer. It is the question wearing it as skies. Scene 6 on Cause, General and Particular Then tell me why the same kind of cause, say, fire arises from such different means, dry grass rubbed, wood churned, sunlight gathered through a lens. If cause determines effect strictly, how does one effect come from three, unlike origins? Because causal power is known through observed correlation in each distinct context, not Not proclaimed once for all context at once. Grinding, churning, focusing, three different causal complexes, each independently verified to yield fire under its own conditions. Nothing in that variety damages the rule that in effect requires a sufficient cause. It only shows that backslash, a sufficient cause backslash can be realized more than one way. The rule survives. Only your picture of it was too narrow. a murmur of a sin. Scene 7 Unseen Merit as the Cause of the World Backslash S Diversity Granola, why must have Unseen Merit and Demerit, Adresha, be the missing cause? Why not simply say ordinary, visible, auxiliary causes strong together explain all the diversity we see? Because of visible chains of cause, alum explained everything, no one would trouble to perform a single unrewarded ritual, and yet people do expecting nothing here only hereafter. Ask why they persist, not for pleasure. The unbeliever seeks pleasure more directly and skips the ritual, not for reputation alone. That fails to explain private devotion no one sees, not because elders deceive the young, for the elders themselves keep the observance, and a deceiver does not usually deceive himself first. Some cunning founder inventing it all for his own gain, then the alone should have grown rich and free, giving nothing away, yet the pattern runs the other direction entirely the sincere giveaway what they have. way Gloss of Account without an unseen throat survives scrutiny. Something unseen, some Ed Richter must be admitted as the real cause connecting this act to that throat. Scene 8 Potency as an independent reality causality of absence. narrator reads the section title, Udayana and the object to work through a longer technical passage condensed here to its spine-dopk slash. Even so, must this backslash potency backslash you speak of be some separate reality over and above the visible substances that act could not mere absence of an obstruction be doing the causal work with nothing further needed. Absence can remove a hindrance, it cannot, by itself, produce a positive effect to make bricks into a house you need not only the absence of the builder backslush s-laziness, but the mason backslush s-hand, ritual likewise, does not merely clear a pair. lays down something, a residual potency in the agent, that ripens later into frout, 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. This is the same style of reasoning that will, in time, carry us all the way to God and inference from effect to a cause required by the effect. Nothing mystical, nothing merely asserted. Scene 9 Whom does ritual consecrate? Exposition of Samkéer and its critique. The Samkéer teacher rises. Let me offer our school backslash as account. Since it touches your very question, we hold that Prakriti, primordinal nature, unconscious but active woven of the three gooners, undertakes all transformation of the world unaided for the sake of Pyrrhasha backslash as liberation. no further cause. Unseen merit or God is required. Prakriti alone suffices as the ground of ritual backslash s power and the world backslash s unfolding. In elegant system, Teacher and I will rant it much, but consider Prakriti as you describe her as one undifferentiated at the route, acting always by the same essential nature, a single uniform cause, left to itself cannot by itself explain the sequence of unlike effects arising one after another, each waiting its turn 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. We are no longer very far apart. You have simply not yet given it the name I give it. We will not settle that today, but I concede the difficulty is real. No. Scene 10. The Carvaka is answered. The Carvaka steps forward in patient.xlash. Enough delicacy. There is no unseen anything. What is not seen, touched, or reasoned from direct perception is simply not there to reason about. Ritual is habit. The next world is a story told to keep the poor obedient. Then answer me plainly. Carvaka, why do sincere people perform rites that cost them, that bring them no worldly return that they could abandon at no cost to their reputation, still they persist, quietly, without display. You have called it habit, but habit needs a first cause too, and every account you offer, pleasure, custom, deception, a founder backflush s cunning, collapses the moment it is tested, as I have already shown this assembly. What is not directly seen is not thereby proven false. It is simply what must be established by inference, which is the very tool you yourself used to work from smoke to fire, though you have never seen the two joined at the source. Influence, I permit. Faith, I do not. Then let us continue by inference alone. That is all I have asked of anyone in this hall. Scene 11, the border and the doctrine of Momenturinus. The border steps forward, Dotpa slash. Udea, your whole argument leans on things that endure, an agent who ritually acts today and reaps tomorrow, a self that persists to receive the fruit. Nothing endures. Every existent is momentary, arising and perishing in the same instant it appears. What you call backslash, the same person backslash tomorrow, is only a causal series, each moment new. Then tell me, on your own doctrine, who reaps what was owned by a moment that no longer exists at the time of rebelling? If nothing endures, even an instant longer than its arising, the doer of the deed and the receiver of the fruited ore, by your own account, two different, unconnected momentary existence, and moral responsibility itself dissolves. Consider it too, how ordinary recognition works. I see a jar today, and know it as the same jar I saw yesterday, not a new jar resembling the old, if that recognition of identity were always illusion, no cognition of difference between two moments could stand as reliable either, since both rest on on the same faculty of comparing and crosstown. Deny persistence, route, 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. We say the continuity is causal, not substantial. An ecological series sufficiently unified to carry karmic fraud across time is in every respect that matters here, what I mean by an enduring self. We may be closer in substance than in vocabulary, month, but something persists. On that, this bouquet cannot yield. Scene 12, persistence and causality reconciled, deal objection on the eternal self. Grant persistence then. SILF, if an object backsash, s very nature, is to be a cause. Must it not cause its effect always, everywhere, the moment it exists, the way blue is always blue. Yet an eternal, all-pervading self is not seen to produce pleasure and pain at every moment. can causality and an eternal self be reconciled at all. Because causality is not backslush, any object automatically produces any effect it is capable of, always dot backslash it is the unobstructed antecedence of a cause relative to its effect, ascertained sometimes by watching agreement and difference, where that gales as with something eternal and everywhere present, which cannot be absent anywhere to test the backslush difference backslush side, ascertained instead through a reason that establishes the causal relation directly. The self produces pleasure and pain only in conjunction with its proper auxiliary conditions, mind, body, the ripening of that same unseen potency we spoke of earlier. Not everything blue produces every blue thing backslash s affects at all times either a particular cause with its particular auxiliaries present produces its particular effect that is simply what causality means. One stated carefully, an ordinary experience confirms it at every turn. CONCLUDING PRAYER Scene 13. CONCLUDING PRAYER OF THE FIRST BOUKEI Udayana turns again toward the unseen image, the hall-quiet's dot-biss-slash. That hidden power of the Supreme Lord which deals, each soul its portion, call it mire, since the mind cannot grasp it whole, call it prayer-creedy, since all creation springs from it. Avalabdavidir, since knowledge loam dissolves it, may that Lord, standing beyond the whole disordered churn of this creation, resting in perfect peace, wait devotion in my heart, stand as witness visibly to what I offer here." Curtain begins to fall slowly on the sabbat, lamp still burning. As assembly murmurs, some persuaded, some still folding their arms. The debate visibly unfinished, waiting for the second bouquet dot b-slash. Act 2. The second bouquet of flowers, of arguments concerning valid cognition, the eternity of the Vedda, and the possibility of a new creation. New voice joining this act, the Mimum Saka, a Vedic ritualist scholar Curtis Button yielding, who holds that the Vedda is awfulous and eternal, and that cognition proves its own truth without external help We have established, across the first bouquet, that an unseen destiny governs the fruit of every act, but destiny itself must have some cause, and no creature among us can perceive that cause directly. No one acts purposefully toward what lies wholly beyond cognition, so some extraordinary, omniscient being must exist, able to hand down to us true knowledge that is not causally linked, so that we may act rightly at all. Why reach for an omnipotent God? You Deanna, when the beginningless and broken chain of Vedic tradition already carries that knowledge to us, or if you distrust in authorless veda, the sage Kapila and others attain omniscience through yoga and discipline alone, neither requires your God. This valid cognition depends on causes outside itself and the world is not on any account unbroken. It dissolves periodically entirely. Scene 2 is validity known from within or from outside. Before you reach for God, settle a smaller question first. One might say, and yours have long disputed. When a cognition arises, is its truth known automatically, and the very arising of it? to cognize something at all simply is to take it as true. What later proves false was, on inspection, never truly a cognition. Then explained out, Mimmsaka. If validity announced itself the instant a cognition arose, no cognition could ever be doubted, yet we doubt constantly. The moment a cognition dos and backslash, T-resemble others already confirmed true. Validity, like invalidity, is known by something external to the bare fact of cognizing a further mark, a further inference, a test in successful action. But your box-lush, external-test box-lush invites its own regress. If a second cognition is needed to certify the first, a third is needed to certify the second, and so on without end. Not so, because most of the time, certifying validity is simply unnecessary. Where there is neither doubt, nor a reason for doubt, belief in an object arises, and we act on it without any separate act of certification. Only where doubt genuinely arises does the further inference come in, and there, it terminates, because the redress you fear threatens your backslash, intrinsic validity backslash, doctrine exactly as much as mine. You too must postulate that a cognition backslash s backslash being known backslash is itself validly postulated, prove that, and you are inferring all over again. Affair it. Consider the thirsty man, who drinks the moment he sees water. You backslash d say he directly perceives water backslash s power to quench thirst, since he acts without hesitation. He does not. That power is inferred, instantly and unconsciously, from past experience. The way desire itself is born from a swift, silent inference that a certain action gets a certain result. Swiftness is not same as... An extrinsic test, taken quickly, still remains extrinsic. Scene 3. Dream, waking, and more backslash, S2 hands. Then tell me how any of us tells waking from dreaming at all, you may honor. If malidity 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 supplies its own standard against which the dream is measured and found wanting. The western legion reymer sharpen out still. A philosopher, Muur, may call him, held up both his hands before a haul and said, Maxash, here is one hand, here is another, therefore external objects are real not Maxash, his critics answered, if your merry eyes could be doubted, showing us your hands proves nothing. Let them doubt on. A mere logical possibility that evidence might someday surface against But the fact is not the same as evidence that has surfaced. Push that skepticism to its root, and you land on the law of uncontradiction itself. Call it a tautology, if you like, empty of content, but even the skeptic must stand on it to say anything at all, including his doubt. I do not need certainty invulnerable to every conceivable future. I need what any reasonable inquiry needs. The balance of evidence, honestly weighed. And on that balance, NiaBaxash, S-account of validity, known through Mark's external to bear cognition, confirmed by successful action, carries the greater weight. Illusion and error are undiable facts of experience. If, as U-Bim-Msa could say, everything cognized is thereby true, what, then, are illusion and error? You have no answer for that. Scene 4. Proofs that sound is not eternal. Hunt me this much, then, and let me change ground. Even without your god, the VEDA need not be authored at all. The VEDA, and the very sound it is made of, may simply be eternal, requiring no faultless speaker and no author to answer for. There I must take that from you too, friend, and I will do it from plain hearing. We say, every day, backslash, that sound has stopped. Backslash, the drum was struck, and now it is silent. It is a direct cognition of sound backslash as destruction. Sound cannot have merely moved elsewhere, being formless. It cannot have been covered over, for covering belongs to things with shape. It has not merely grown too faint for us, for the same excuse would prove that a shattered pot has not really broken, only become invisible. But there cannot perceive that absence directly, it substratum, ether, cannot be perceived at all. We 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 beat its locus. And listen to the sound itself. Trises, Falls, Loudons, Soffins, One and the same eternal thing cannot bear opposed qualities at once. What you call backslash, the same word, recognized again backslash, is a flame recognized again, new fuel, new light, each moment, called by one name out of habit. Production and destruction, not eternity, is what your own ear tells you, if you will trust it. The tradition will need to answer your dissuadlings, elsewhere. It will. For now, it is enough that sound, and with it, the spoken feather, is produced, and what is produced can be lost. Which returns us to the question, who restores it, each time the world dissolves, and forgets. Scene 5. How can a new creation even begin? I grant dissolution during dissolution on your own account nothing moves nothing acts the sky itself stand empty and still what then could possibly initiate a new creation out of absolute stillness consider deep sleep first and a smaller case of the same puzzle in dreamless sleep the self-backslash s cognition desire pleasure and pain all fall silent together yet the body backslash s breath continues, faint, and the self-wakes again damaged. So to that cosmic dissolution, an extremely subtle motion persists in the atoms of the four elements, to find a register as backslash, the world backslash, until its final stage marks the moment, and becomes the seed of new creation. It is not that a day must always be preceded by a other day of its own kind, the first day of the monsoon is preceded by the last day of summer, not by another rainy day. So to the first day of a new creation is preceded by dissolution, not by another day of an old world. And the first human beings, the first Brahmins, the first speakers of editor not all, no parent taught them to speak, for there was no one yet to teach. As the first scorpion rises from Ra and Dun, 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 backslash s-ton gesture as a puppeteer moves a puppet backslash 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, podder to podder, weaver to weaver, teacher to student, descend unbroken until the next dissolution breaks it again. The long decline, and why scripture needs restoring. And do not imagine the chain is holding as firmly today as it once did. Look honestly at what has already frayed. Right's once performed with full memory of thousands of Vedic branches how survive, if at all, through a single branch, imperfectly kept. Dharma once stood on four legs, austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, charity. 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 feather, not on the general good conduct of virtuous people copying one another, for if virtuous conduct alone were sufficient to make an act obligatory, no scriptural injunction would be needed at all, and yet we all know rights that have lapsed entirely, with no living witness, that must one day be restored, not merely remembered. Restoration needs a knower, and faith in scripture merely recognizes truth, it cannot manufacture it, once the original cause is gone. Scene 7. Capilla is tested, and found insufficient. Let Kapila serve us that nor a sage of direct perception, purified by yoga, moved by compassion for suffering creatures, capable of reviving what scripture has lost. Test that claim as carefully as you tested mine, friend. Meditation may indeed be a means of knowing what is otherwise hidden, I do not deny it wholesale, but meditation does not automatically yield knowledge the instant it is practiced. It needs some other means to confirm what it has found. What confirms capillabac slash ass meditation on compassion and on violence, whose fruits no one has ever seen? A coward meditates fruitfully on a snake only because he has met a snake before. No one has met the fruit of yoga directly, in this life or between two lives, for the body that acts in this birth, and the body that reaps the fruit in the next are not even the same body, and without some experience link-joining the two, the connection cannot be verified at all. It is said some remember former births. It is said, but art established. A teacher, who falls asleep on a holiday night, and resumes yesterday backslash SS an at-a-don proves only that memory holds within one life, not across the gulf between two. and consider the very first promise at creation backslash s-torn. By what memory could they have known their own lineage if no one had yet been born to remember it? No power of travel between worlds is proven either that might have carried settlers in bearing a caste system readymade. It is, in the end, simpler and more reasonable to accept one omniscient, omnipotent being Who needs nobody, no untested memory, no unproven journey between worlds, and to multiply unproven, half omniscient sages to do the same work badly. I will carry the question forward, Udayana. I do not yet carry your conclusion. That is exactly as debate should stand, at the end of its second round. Scen8. Concluding prayer of the second bouquet. You day on the terms, one small award the unseen image.bx May my heart hold fast to sheave until life.bx As last moment, he who, aided by the destinies of every being, builds this astonishing world again and again, and, like a magician doing his own trick, un-makes it again, Who's 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. A mimum-soccer remains seated in thought as the lamp dims. Assembly murmurs, the ground has shifted. Oh no one yet concedes.buck slash. Act 3. A third bouquet of flowers. of arguments refuting every alleged proof that God does not exist. The atheist, nastiker, joins the flawless act, not a school so much as a stance, whatever cannot be caught by some means of knowledge, he holds, cannot be real. The carmarker, the mimmsarker, and the V.I.S.H.E.S.H.I.K.A. are precise, Category-Logition Cousin Tanaya also speak.buckslash. Scene 1, Backslash, he is not seen, therefore he is not Backslash. Curtain rises. The lamp is trimmed higher, this bouquet is the hall Backslash, S most contested Dot Backslash. You have spent 2 bouquets building to Watermaker of the World, you may honor. I will spend this one demolishing the foundation. If God existed, he ought to be knowable, as a cow Backslash, S horn is knowable by its shape and color. is not known. Therefore he does not exist, exactly as a hairback slash s-horn does not exist, precisely because, though its shape would be knowable if it were there, no one could ever perceive one. A clean argument, and cleanly wrong at its first step. Your inference works only, where the object was already granted to be perceptible, the hairback slash s-horn failed 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. Save your strongest objection for the fifth, when the inferences themselves stand before you. For now I only clear the ground, not a prehension of Everything ever claimed to be apprehensible proves a thing. Seen to sleep, the self, and what not 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, on waking, that you have ceased to exist. Why does the same silence applied to God not equally prove his absence? in sleep, the causes that would produce self-cognition are simply not assembled, the mind has withdrawn from the senses, not because the self has vanished, but because the instrument of noticing it has gone quiet. The very fact you rely on, that no one doubts their own continued existence through a dreamless eye, is itself proof that unapprehension does not entail unexistence. You have refuted your own method with your own example. Then try this instead, a consciously ignored to show bodily activity as the sprouting seed shows the God of the box as shash 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 Carvaca backslash, S-Wager, and why it cannot be cached. The Carvaca Steps in, sharper than before. Backslash. Let me strip this man for the money I see his pants. I do not even require backslash, noble button, no backslash as your loophole. My rule is simpler. What is not known in any sense does not exist. What is known exists. God is never known. Finished. Then finish it, Carvaka, and see where it leads you. On your rule, the moment you step outside your own house, you no longer perceive your wife, your children, your stored brain, by your own law. They must be judged destroyed the instant your eyes leave them. Do you believe that? Memory assures me they remain. Memory assures you have many destroyed things too. A childhood house long, since fallen, a friend long dead. Memory alone cannot certify present existence. The instant you leave on memory to save your family from your own rule, you have conceded exactly what I need. Unapprehension does not prove unexistence. Consider the die itself. The very organ you're backslash, seeing backslash, depends on is never itself seen, yet you do not doubt it exists. Your rule, followed honestly, destroys your own instrument of doubting. Ordinary 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 it's existance 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. Scene 4. Why inference itself survives the doubt? Rent inference some round, then, if you insist. But how is that about it ever finally removed? Every absorbed pattern might break tomorrow, or a mile from here, or under some condition we haven't backslash the thought to check. Let threat never closes. It closes the moment you notice something you have already conceded. To doubt a future deviation, you must already be able to think about the future, and that very capacity 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, outends 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, It's self-effect could never have arisen in you at all. A reasonable mind does not chase every conceivable exception forever. It follows a reason whose perversion has been tested and holds and acts. Carry it forward, then. I will listen to the rest. Scene 5. Comparison and the 5th UK Backslash S-Coming Test. Set aside. One more avenue, you Diana, before you move on. Some old backslash, comparison backslash, cognition from observed similarity, to be its own independent means of knowledge, distinct from perception and inference. If so, a difficulty for your followers, everything known resembles something else already known, but the God you describe as nothing else similar to many were, could comparison then prove in absence, by that very singularity? Only if similarity were some third kind of entity, neither being nor unbeing, and no such third kind exists. Being and unbeing exhaust the field, then I won, and you have thereby affirmed that 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. be singular. Uniqueness is not a defect that argument can weaponize. It is simply a fact some subjects have, and others don't. C6. Verbal Testimony, and the dispute over an omniscient author. Then let me press you on testimony itself, since this whole book is a closed-back to whether the Veda needs an author at all. The Veshe Shaka treats an ordinary sentence S-box slash S-meaning are something inferred from the speaker box slash S-intention, testimony reduced to a kind of inference. My own school box slash S-prubhakara branch goes further, only the Veda, being authorless, car in independent authority, an ordinary human sentence is trustworthy only one S-inference has certified the speaker reliable. Both positions ask testimony to do more work than it needs to. The moment you already know a word backslash s expressive power, the sentence backslash s meaning arrives with the hearing of it, no separate inferential step, no prior certification of the speaker backslash s reliability, is required for comprehension to occur at all. A child, who does not yet know whether the Vedic has an author still understands the Vedic sentence perfectly well the moment he hears it. That alone shows understanding does not wait on settling authorship first. Testimony is its own means of knowledge, standing beside perception and inference, not smuddled inference wearing a disguise. Then consider the sharper objection some raise directly against you. If an omniscient creator composes even human language itself at the world-buck slash s-ton, teaching the first speakers word by word, how could such teaching ever get off the ground with no shared word yet existing between teacher and pupil to teach with. As I have already shown you, in the second bouquet, through gesture before word, exactly as a puppeteer backslash, S chord makes a puppet backslash, 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 know this at the objection, however sharp it sounds, has already been met. Scene 7. Postulation and not apprehension, briefly weighed and found insufficient. Narrator reads the remaining section titles together, briskly, as you day honor answers each in turn, the pace quickens here, a flurry rather than a dual dot backslash. 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. One undended other, you may honor, since you have answered comparison and testimony. Postulation, first, the inference forced on us when a known fact makes no sense otherwise, does postulation not, in some case, force us to explain the world without God, and so crowd Him out. Show me the fact that only makes sense without a maker, and I will answer it directly, but no one in this hall has yet produced one. Every alleged case of backslash, postulation against God backslash, turns out, an inspection, to be an ordinary inference wearing postulation backslash's name, and ordinary inference I have already answered at length. Then no apprehension, once more, in its fullest form, not merely Baxash, I have not seen him Baxash, which you answered in the first scene, but the deeper demands acclaim that no apprehension is itself a distinct sense-born means of knowledge, and that its silence regarding God should count as positive evidence. Trace it carefully and it collapses into perception after all. A normal, unimpaired sense produces the determinate cognition backslash, no pot here backslash by apprehending the place where the pot would be, not by some free-floating faculty of noticing absences in general. general. And the faculty that is, at bottom. Perception in other guys inherits exactly the limit perception already had. It can report the absence only of what it was ever fit to detect in the first place. God was never within that fitness. The silence proves a thing new. It only restates, for the third time this UK, the very first answer I gave you. Then I have exhausted perception, inference and apprehension, comparison, testimony and postulation, and none of them has delivered me your absence. Not exhausted, friend, only tested, fairly, one at a time. That is all I have asked of anyone across this whole bouquet. C-Nate. Closing prayer of the third bouquet. Uday on a terms, one last time this act, toward the unseen image dot back slash. With full devotion we bow to that God of Gods, worshiped across every tradition in this hall under a hundred names, whose quiet festival of bliss no rival joy equals, whose reality no perception can catch, and discard, no inference overturn, no other means of knowledge unseat, and on whom, in the end, every one of those means of knowledge itself depends to be trustworthy at all. Curtain falls. The atheist remains standing a moment longer than the rest of the assembly before he, too, sits. Act 4. The Fourth Bukkei of Flowers. Of arguments concerning God as Noah, and the true nature of cognition. The shortest Bukkei, and the most inward turning, having secured that God exists, cannot be disproved, the whole now asks what it even means to call an unmoving, all knowing being a backslash, no a backslash, at all. The Mimmsaka carries most of the argument this act dot backslash. Scene 1. Can Omniscience Even Be Valid Cognition? Curtain rises on the same lamplit subar, later still. Udayana looks tired in the a good way, a debate deep into his case, not worn down by it.buckslash. One more difficulty, you're the armor, 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. Godbuckslash is knowledge in total, nothing is ever new to him. If nothing is ever new to him, on your own definition, nothing he knows can count as valid knowledge at all. And if his knowledge is not valid, he has no trust when they author a benefit, including the meda you have spent rebuking defendant. Then the flaw is in that definition, not in God. Backslash, knowing what was not known before backslash, 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. Novel detracts 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-max-sh's cognition, being total and never in error, is as true as any cognition could be, whether or not any of it is backslash, new backslash, to him. Then how do you distinguish a second tree 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 can authorize from a thing. A fresh seeing of the same jar depends on the jar being presently there, seen again through its own causes, not recalled from a store. And God-backslash-S case is simpler still than either. His cognition of the whole universe is a single, self-identical act, dependent on no other cognition before it, needing no second glance at anything. Call it neither new, nor old, it simply is, entire, all at once. Scene 2. A bid for backslash, known as backslash, 3 attempts, 3 failures. Let me try a different door then. Surely cognition does something to its object, leaves a mark on it. We call this mark backslash, known as backslash. The property and object gains, simply by being known, of having been known. Without it, backslash, being produced backslash, 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 unsurvive testing. First, that cognition, being an action, must yield a result the way any action yields a result, and that result is knownless. But a narrow shot at the empty sky produces no result in the sky. Cognition may be like that arrow. Real motion, no mark left behind. Second, that we say backslash, the pot is known backslash, and this phrase itself proves some new property sits on the pot. But we equally say backslash, the pot was destroyed backslash 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 produced the cognition in the first place, nothing further needs to be posited to explain the talk. Then Onus explains nothing but cognition box-ish, a soul nature-dolson box-ish, T.R.E.B. 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. Scene 3. Is cognition itself something we perceive? Set the object aside, then, and turn the question on cognition itself. How do you even know a cognition has a card, if not through some form of 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 backslash's own kitchen lets one recognize by the same mark, a second fire glimpse later on a distant hill through its smoke. Cognition is not itself perceived through some second, separate cognition standing outside it. The mind backslash S-direct relation to the self, in whom cognition inheres, is enough. Then answer the harder form of the question. On your school backslash S-own account, a cognition last 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 crossed and the first, or has the object, and a tendent, already changed. The same object, held across both moments, nothing stranger is required than granting that a cognition, once a reason, persists briefly enough to do both jobs without contradiction, to disclose its object, and to become, in turn, an object for the mind-backslash-s-next plans. Chase the alternative you backslash, re-gesturing to ward, that each vanishing instant would need its own vanishing backslash, known as backslash, to certify it, and that known as its own further known as to certify it, and you have simply reproduced, one level up, the same infinite regress you were trying to rescue backslash, known as backslash, from in the first place. Simplicity favors dropping the extra entity, not multiplying it. Scene 4. What backslash, no backslash means, for a being who does not act. Grant everything so far. Still, every backslash means of knowledge backslash. We have ever named this defined by doing something. Did I act upon light, an inference acts through a middle term, a word acts through a speaker backslash, a deterrence. God, on your account, does none of this, no sense contact, no middle term, no speech act producing his knowledge. By what right? Then, do you still call him a no-er at all, using a word built entirely out of agency? Because ordinary etymology gives only the common root of a word backslash, s meaning, not the whole of how it is actually used. We call a sense faculty a backslash, means of knowledge backslash, because it is causally involved in producing cognition. We call God a backslash, noor backslash, for a different, equally legitimate reason. Cognition simply resides in him, as a permanent feature of what he is, without needing to be produced by anything at all. A person can be a noor 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. Broden backslash, Perception backslash, to mean simply direct, uninterrupted awareness of an object, not perception through sense contact specifically, and God backslash s-knowing falls naturally under that wider sense, without forcing a new category into being. Scene 5. Thus burying every error make God backslash s-cognition erroneous. One last thrust, and then I yield the spookay. If God is omniscient, he knows every false belief every creature have ever held, every illusion, every mistake and inference, every dream. But then the objects of all are error-mar, in some sense, present within their own cognition too. Does that not make the cognition itself short for an error? And if the knowledge already contains our mistakes, what use is the teaching in dispelling them? You have confused the error with the knowledge of the error, friend, and that confusion is exactly the kind of mistake God-back-slash-es cognition, unlike ours, never makes. An illusion is false. But a true cognition that identifies an illusion as illusion, back-slash-es is a false cognition. Back-slash-es 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, an 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. I have carried 4 bouquets of doubt into this hall, you de-ah-ah, and you have met everyone of them without once raising your voice. I do not yet call myself an sudden fool, but I no longer call myself your opponent either, only your most stubborn student. The debate has no better outcome than that, friend. Sit, and rest a moment. What remains is art defense any longer. Scene 6. Turning toward the 5th bouquet. No concluding prayer is given for this bouquet in the source text. The surviving page is moved directly from the discussion of God backslash, s-knowledge of error into the great positive proofs. The rater marks the term, instead.backslash. 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, In this fourth and shortest bouquet, the question of what it even means to call so still a being a backslash, no a dot backslash, 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 backslash, s first move at all. That is the fifth bouquet and the summit of this whole garden. Curtain falls softly, no music offending, only a pause, lamp trimmed brighter for what follows.buckslash. Act 5. The Fifth Bouquet of Flowers. The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence. The summit of the debate. You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof. The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence. The summit of the debate. You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof. The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence. The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence. The eight proofs establishing Godbuckslash's existence. The summit of the debate. You day are no longer merely answers, he deals, proof after proof. longer merely answers, he builds, proof after proof, each one standing on its own feet. The atheist, the kavaka, the mimamsaka, the samkhya teacher, the border, and the vishishikas are all present in the hall, no longer opposing in turn, but listening as one assembly to a case finally being made in full dot book slash. Scene 1. Framing the aid. The lamp burns steady. You day on the stand at the center of the hall, and for once no one interrupts him at the start.buckslash. For buccase, and I have done nothing yet, but clear drowned, answering doubt, refuting attack, defending the possibility of a maker. Tonight I stop defending. Eight proofs stand Eight proofs stand before you, each sufficient on its own, needing no opponent backslash as first move to exist at all. At the world is an effect. At the first motion in the atoms requires a mover. At the world is sustained. But it is destroyed. At the very conventions of word and craft require the first teacher. At the validity of the scriptural tradition demands a trustworthy source. That scripture itself testifies to its author. That even their number, two-ness, three-ness, in things too small for any of us to count, bears the mark of accounting mind. Test each one as harshly as you have tested everything else I have said this evening. I ask only that you test them one at a time, on their own ground. Begin, then. I have not conceded easily tonight, and I will not begin now. Good. That is exactly how this should end. Scene 2. The first proof. The world is an effect. The earth, the mountains, the bodies we sit in, all of it is produced, exactly as a part is produced. And a thing produced lacks a producer. Therefore, the world has a maker. Then that make a fuzzabody, as every potter does, and if he fuzzabody, he is not the bodiless god you have been building toward for 4BuCase. Press that objection, and watch it fall through your own hands. Either you are claiming God fuzzabody, 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. Backslash, embodied backslash, was never the load-bearing part of my proof. You have argued against a word I did not need. Scene 3. The Second Proof. Motion in the Atoms. Consider the Atoms themselves, then, before they ever became a back-sash, world-back-sash, at all. At creation back-sash is first instant, Atoms that had never before moved began to move, and combine. What is inert cannot move itself, a spider does not swing itself into the Earth. Something conscious must impale it. Destiny alone might account for that first motion, without any conscious impeller at all. Destiny is one cause among several needed, teacher, not a cause that crowds out all the others. An inert thing, precisely because it is inert, needs a locus of consciousness to set it moving, exactly as a spade needs a hand. You may call the specific motion of a living body backslash, different in kind backslash, From the first motion of an atom, if you like, but define backslash, bodily motion backslash, any way you choose, and you will find the definition already assumes exactly what I am arguing. A special motion, produced by a conscious agent. You cannot use the very thing under dispute to disqualify the inference that establishes it. Scene 4. The Third and Fourth Proofs. Sustaining and Destruction. The world, immense and heavy as it is, does not fall, as a bird-back slash s-rate weight does not fall, sustained by its own effort in flight. Something sustains the whole of it, moment to moment, the way effort sustains a living body. And when that same world is later destroyed, down to the smallest indivisible pair of atoms, destruction, too, requires an agent capable of it, precisely as class is destroyed only by the tearing hand, not by nothing. Bestinia again might account for both stability without a sustainer, dissolution without a destroyer. Bestinia is real, and I have never denied it, but a cause of knowledge is not every cause excluded. If Bestinia alone explained the body backslash as sustenance, effort itself would have no work left to do in keeping a living creature upright, which is plainly false, as any Any of us standing in this hall could tell you. Sustaining and destroying are, each one, effects. Effects need agents. The world-back-slash-ass-mastness is no exemption from a rule that governs every smaller thing we have ever watched rise and fall. Scene 5. A Fifth Proof. Who taught the first word? Consider something closer to home, Anathems. The very conventions by which any of us here understands the other. A Potter backslash S-Craft is learned from a other Potter. A Weaver backslash S. From a other Weaver, a child learns the alphabet from a teacher, who learned it from a teacher before. Trace that chain back far enough, and you reach a first link. A first 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 forced link, beginningless, like the round of re-bought it self. The cycle of creation and dissolution is beginningless, monk, I do not dispute that. But within any one cycle, at its own fresh dawn, there are no fallen or ordinary human beings yet available to have originated anything. Something must set the very first convention moving, in each new beginning, the way a puppeteer backsash s-gesture, a chord-pulled, a hand-pointed, teaches a watching child the meaning of a word before any word has yet been spoken between them. That first teacher need not keep a body permanently, scripture itself records a being who takes form again and again, precisely to renew what would otherwise be lost. 6. The 6 and 7 Proofs. A trustworthy tradition. And scripture backslash. A zone word. Then let me meet you on my own round, one final time. You say the Vedic tradition backslash is validity itself proves a source behind it. But validity, on my school backslash, is teaching, needs no external guarantee, it is simply what a properly caused cognition already is. And if every cognition backslash s-malidity 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 table, held by learned people across every generation, is not the kind of thing a single limited person invents from a thing. It requires, at its root, one being of the requisite excellence to originate it truly. Scripture does not merely imply such a source, it names one. In passage after passage, unprompted by any need for praise, the meta speaks of itself and issuing from a knowing mouth. Backslash this meta issues from me, in every cycle a new dot-backslash, 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. You have carried that thread across four bookcase 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. Scene 7. An interlude. Who commands, when scripture commands? One thread you have not yet pulled, you be honored. Scripture does not merely describe, it commands. Backsash, the self should be known not backsash, 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. Not action, for backsash, know the self backsash, command nothing that moves through space at all, and any command reduced to mere action collapses into every ordinary sentence describing a person walking to market. Not desire either, for the very desire to actorize is only from cognizing the command backslash 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 backslash s intention that the listener act, and an intention requires, by its very grammar, a Nintendo. You should do this. Is meaningless without someone whose desire expresses concern in you. Every injunction in scripture examined honestly down to its grammar, point smack to a speaker standing behind the verb. C-Nate. The eight proof. What counts the atoms? And last, the strangest and, to my mind, the most delicate of the eight. A pair of atoms has a certain magnitude. A triad, a magnitude far greater, too great to be explained by atomic size alone, for if mere multiplication of atoms explained it, two atoms together should already show that same gross size, and they plainly do not. Something beyond bare aggregation, a numbering, accounting, must operate even here, at a scale no eye in this hall could ever perceive directly. Tunis is not a property lying passively in the pair. It arises through an act of enumeration. And atoms are, by their very nature, invisible to every one of us. Whose enumeration, then, gives the diadids Tunis, if no phyite creature has ever counted a single atom in its life. Only a omniscient counter. Only a omniscient counter. Eight proofs, friend, the world as effect, the atoms backslash, first motion, its sustaining, its destruction, the first teaching of every word we speak, the validity of an ancient trust, scripture backslash, its own testimony to its source, and our number itself, present in what a 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 hall can be. I claim only that eight independent lines, converging on the same conclusion from eight different directions no one of them borrowed from the others, are not eight coincidences. That is what a bouquet is, in the end, not one breakable flower, But many gathered together, so that even if one pedal bruises, the bouquet itself still stands whole in your hand. See line, direct nerring, beyond argument. And there's there truly no way to know him except by chains of reasoning, Yudiana, it proofs, each requiring a haul like this one, and an evening like this one to walk through. Reasoning is not the only door. Yagin's report-direct inner knowing of him, the way a dream sometimes shows a mind-things-no-external-sense supplied it, not every dream is mere memory replayed. Some carry the texture of genuine experience. Through discipline, through the stealing of ordinary restlessness, that same kind of unmediated knowing is said to be possible for God as it is, in smaller measure, for the vividness of a true dream. I have not asked this hall to take that on-face tonight. I have only walked 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 Hole Bukke. You day on the terms, for the last time in this drama, toward the unseen image at the head of the hall. The whole assembly, objector, mimmsaka, kawaka, samkhya, boda, vashishika, atheist, falls quiet around him.buckslash. If even this, eight proofs, offered honestly, tested honestly, cannot move a mind, that mind is stone, and no bouquet of arguments will soften stone. So I do not pray for victory here. I pray instead, may this bouquet of reasoning perfume both ostrals equally, may it satisfy the theist who came already believing, and, in its own time, reach even the atheist who came to break it. And if it cannot do even that much, then let it rest simply as an offering. Gathered honestly, kept fresh, laid without expectation at the feet of the Lord of Teachers, who alone knows whether the mind that hears it tonight will find its way home sooner, or only later, or by some other road than this hall backslash s, entirely. Along steel-ness. 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 Bukkei, begins its final, slow descent over the lamplit sub-R.buck slash. Five Bukkeis, eight proofs, and one lamp that has not gone out all evening. The debate ends here. Whether it ends settled in, as it always is in this hall, left to the one who carries it out the door. End of Act 5, end of the play.

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