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Collection: Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11
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0:07–0:25Setting a debating hall, a servant carries in a lamp at dusk and in the failing light, sets down beside the door a coil of rope and an arm's length from it, a small conch shell washed white by years of handling, props for an argument not yet noticed by the assembly.
0:25–0:32Satradhara enters. Every debate needs a mistake to start from, and this one has two, lying by
0:32–0:38the door where you can see them if you look a rope and a shell. In bad light, a man once mistook
0:38–0:44the rope for a snake and leapt back with his heart pounding, though no snake was ever there.
0:44–0:50Another, reaching for a coin, mistook a shell for a piece of silver, and his hand closed with
0:50–0:56pleasure on nothing. Every school in this hall agrees the man was wrong. What they cannot
0:56–1:01agree on is what happened when he was wrong where, if anywhere, the silver was while he
1:01–1:02was seeing it.
1:02–1:08Vikas Bhati, Mishra, spent a lifetime's commentary on this single hinge because he saw that the
1:08–1:13answer to what is a mistake and the answer to what is the world turn out on inspection
1:13–1:19to be the same question asked twice. Watch the shell. It will not leave the stage
1:19–1:22until the debate is finished with it. Act 1
1:22–1:26The voice that says aye, Vakarspati is seated.
1:26–1:29The object that enters and bows.
1:29–1:33Before you come, Embram and to us is something worth inquiring into.
1:33–1:35A courier answer a plainer difficulty.
1:35–1:39Inquiry exists for what is doubtful or for what is useful to no one's doubt is settled.
1:39–1:41But no one doubts his own existence.
1:41–1:46The child, the sage, the beast in the field, every creature that has ever drawn breath knows itself as aye,
1:46–1:48instantly, without proof, without a moment's hesitation.
1:48–1:51If the self is already the best known thing in the world, on what possible ground do you
1:51–1:54propose to inquire into it as though it were hidden?
1:54–1:59You have stated the objection better than most who bring it, and I will not blunt its edge.
1:59–2:00It is true.
2:00–2:02No one doubts a my, or a my not.
2:02–2:05But notice what you have proven and what you have not.
2:05–2:08You have proven that something answering to I is known beyond doubt.
2:08–2:11You have not proven that we know what that something is.
2:11–2:15A man may be certain a face is looking back at him in a dark room and be entirely wrong
2:15–2:17about whose face it is.
2:17–2:22of existence and knowledge of nature are two different achievements, and the entire quarrel
2:22–2:24of this act lies in the gap between them.
2:24–2:25Then show me the gap.
2:25–2:29What, in the plain experience of I, could possibly be mistaken?
2:29–2:32Consider what the word I is made to carry in ordinary speech.
2:32–2:33I am thin.
2:33–2:34I am going.
2:34–2:35I am blind.
2:35–2:40Each ties thy to the body, if the body itself were the referent of I, a man who knew his
2:40–2:45boyhood body and his aged body, two bodies sharing not one hair, not one tooth, not
2:45–2:50But one grain of skin in common across sixty years, could never say, with the confidence
2:50–2:56he does say it, I, who played in my father's lap, now hold my grandson in mind.
2:56–3:00Nothing continuous links those two bodies, except the eye that claims them both, and
3:00–3:05a thing that persists through what changes, and not itself be the changing thing.
3:05–3:08No more than the thread running through a garland is one of the flowers strung upon
3:08–3:09it.
3:09–3:12A dreamer, then, might answer you that I have dreamed I wore a king's body, jeweled
3:12–3:15and tall and woken to find this same short ordinary frame.
3:15–3:19If the dream self is a different self from the waking one, your thread has already snapped.
3:19–3:23On the contrary, you have handed me my own example before I could reach for it.
3:23–3:26The dreamer wakes and says, I am not a king.
3:26–3:31I am a man, the kingly body is what gets cancelled by waking, while the sense of I
3:31–3:35that owned both the dream and the waking equally is cancelled by nothing at all.
3:35–3:38A man who by yogic power takes on a tiger's form does not.
3:38–3:43In that form, cease to experience himself as the same one who was a man a moment before.
3:43–3:47body after body is put on and shed like a traveller is changing coats, the traveller
3:47–3:50is not thereby proven to be one of the coats.
3:50–3:53Then let the senses be the substratum of eye, if not the body for surely the eye that saw
3:53–3:55is not the hand that now touches.
3:55–4:01And yet I say, without a flicker of doubt, what I saw, I now touch, one abridging two
4:01–4:05different instruments, exactly as one abridged two different bodies a moment ago.
4:05–4:10The senses are instruments of the knower, they cannot also be the knower they serve,
4:10–4:13more than the axe can be the woodsman who swings it.
4:13–4:17Grant all this, I still do not see what remains to be inquired into.
4:17–4:22You have only relocated I from body to something behind the body, call it consciousness, and
4:22–4:23be done.
4:23–4:26Here is the second half of your original objection.
4:26–4:30And it is the sharper half, you are right that it existed, and I saved it for its
4:30–4:32proper place.
4:32–4:36Inquiry is pointless where knowledge serves no purpose, but consider the experience of
4:36–4:42that every creature has is an experience of a limited thing. I am in this room, I am small,
4:42–4:46I suffer this grief and not that one. The scriptures which speak of the self,
4:46–4:53as a Q-truty, as a M-Riti, the old epics, describes something that shares none of those limits,
4:53–4:57infinite, undivided, a single and broken mass of consciousness and bliss.
4:57–5:02Either the everyday I and the self of the scriptures are the same reality wrongly seen,
5:02–5:05where there are simply two different things and the scriptures are lying.
5:05–5:11If they are the same reality wrongly seen, then everything turns on the single word wrongly,
5:11–5:16and until we understand what wrongness itself is, we cannot know whether scripture or everyday
5:16–5:20experience has the truer claim on us. That is not a settled question. That is the whole of what
5:20–5:26remains to inquire into. Then the entire edifice you are building rests on knowing what an error is.
5:26–5:31It does, which is why I will not move one step further toward Brahman until that question has
5:31–5:36has been fought to its floor, here, in this hall, by every school willing to defend an
5:36–5:37account of it.
5:37–5:41Bring your strongest opponents, by what rather lose this argument honestly than win it by
5:41–5:43leaving the hardest part for later.
5:43–5:44Act 2.
5:44–5:46The Shell in the Half-Light.
5:46–5:48The lamp by the door is trimmed brighter.
5:48–5:53The Shell, still lying where the servant set it, is now visible to the Hall.
5:53–5:56The Naeikah logician rises.
5:56–5:59Since you have thrown the floor open, Akaria, let me close it quickly.
5:59–6:02A man sees that shell and poor light and cries silver.
6:02–6:07What has happened is not mysterious, silver is a real thing existing somewhere in the
6:07–6:08world.
6:08–6:12An emergent shop, in a coin in his own memory and his cognition has simply misapplied that
6:12–6:16real silver to this location, mistaking one existing thing for another existing thing
6:16–6:18standing in its place.
6:18–6:19Nothing indefinable is required.
6:19–6:23Error is simply any athekaiadi, a real object, wrongly placed.
6:23–6:29A tidy answer, magician, and I will treat it exactly as tidally as it deserves.
6:29–6:33Tell me first, on your account, does his cognition apprehend the shell at all?
6:33–6:37Only confusingly, its thisness is grasped, but its shell nature is mist, owing to some
6:37–6:39defect in the eye or the light.
6:39–6:45And the silver he sees so vividly, where, at that moment, does it actually exist?
6:45–6:49In the market, elsewhere, real as ever, his cognition merely reaches a cross-distance
6:49–6:51and misapplies it here, through the defect.
6:51–6:56All, what extraordinary good fortune poor cognition possesses, that it can reach
6:56–7:00all the way to the merchant's shop and drag a piece of silver bodily into this man's hand.
7:00–7:04And yet still be called nothing more than an ordinary case of getting a location wrong.
7:04–7:10Consider what your own school teaches elsewhere. A cause can only be blocked from producing its
7:10–7:15proper effect by a defect. A defect cannot manufacture in it the power to produce some other
7:15–7:20effect entirely far into its nature. A parched, fire scorched, sugarcane seed does not.
7:20–7:25Missing its proper power, sprout a banana stalk instead, yet you ask me to believe that
7:25–7:30a defective eye, blocked from its proper task of showing a man a shell, somehow acquires the
7:30–7:35entirely different power of hauling real silver across a city and setting it down in his palm.
7:35–7:39That is not a small defect, that is a miracle wearing the modest clothing of an error.
7:39–7:43Then say only that the form of remembered silver arises and is misapplied here,
7:43–7:47not the silver itself traveling bodily. Then you have already abandoned one real thing
7:47–7:52cognized as another, which was your whole doctrine, and slid halfway into my own house
7:52–7:58without paying rent. If it is a mere form, arising from memory and misapplied, tell me plainly.
7:58–8:05Is that form silver, or is it not? If it is truly silver, my earlier question returns in full force.
8:05–8:10Silver cannot intelligibly be here, an object which is not silver, without the very contradiction
8:10–8:15you set out to avoid. If it is not truly silver, then you have quietly granted me everything,
8:15–8:22for that is exactly what I mean by any Avakinia, indefinable, neither simply real nor simply unreal,
8:22–8:28and you have arrived at my conclusion by the scenic route, complaining about the view the entire way.
8:28–8:32The assembly, a low ripple of laughter, quickly suppressed.
8:32–8:37I have answered this objection at length elsewhere in the Nyaknika and will not rehearse the whole
8:37–8:42of it standing here in the evening cold. Nor need you, you have conceded the essential point
8:42–8:47and a debater who yields the center of a citadel need not also surrender the outer wall before
8:47–8:53witnesses. Sit. Friend, you have argued honestly, which is worth more in this hall than winning."
8:53–8:56Act III The Vanishing Difference
8:56–9:03The Prabhikara M. I. Macron M. A. Macron letter 1 E4 3 S. I. K. S. steps forward, more cautious
9:03–9:05than the logician who preceded him.
9:05–9:09I watched my colleague Silver Dragged across the city and I will not repeat his error.
9:09–9:16I posit nothing so extravagant, what actually occurs when a shell is mistaken. Is this
9:16–9:22These two cognitions arise together, a bare perception of this, here and now, and a memory
9:22–9:27of silver, seen long ago, awakened by the shell's faint gleam, the defect lies only
9:27–9:32in this the man fails to notice that one of these is a present perception, and the other
9:32–9:37a mere memory, he runs the two together, unmarked, and speaks as though he perceived one single
9:37–9:44thing, there is no third, indefinable entity anywhere in this story, only ordinary perception,
9:44–9:50memory, and an ordinary failure to keep them apart, call it Aki-Ati not a false cognition
9:50–9:55at all, only a missing cognition—the missing awareness of a distinction.
9:55–10:00A far more careful doctrine than the last, and I will grant the complement of a hard question
10:00–10:07rather than a quick one. Tell me, on your account is the perception this, bear, present, immediate,
10:07–10:08in any way false?
10:08–10:13Not in the least. It is simple and entire accurate. So far as it bows—
10:13–10:17And the memory of silver, is it in itself, false?
10:17–10:19No more than any memory is false.
10:19–10:22It correctly recalls silver once seen.
10:22–10:26The fault lies only in a blending, never in either ingredient.
10:26–10:30Then hear the difficulty this creates for you, and it is fatal.
10:30–10:31Not merely inconvenient.
10:31–10:37The whole world, without exception, describes this experience in a single sentence.
10:37–10:43This is silver, not this, and, separately, I recall silver, a plain, unified, first
10:43–10:48person's claim of identity, spoken with exactly the same confident grammar as this is a pot.
10:48–10:53If what truly occurred were too accurate cognitions standing innocently side by side,
10:53–10:58merely unlabeled, whence comes the positive, mistaken assertion of oneness between them,
10:58–11:03two true things standing near each other, even if their nearness goes unnoticed,
11:03–11:07do not thereby generate a false claim that they are identical. You have accounted for a failure
11:07–11:11to distinguish, you have not accounted for the man's eager reach toward the ground to
11:11–11:17to pick the silver up, missing a difference is a kind of blindness. Reaching for a coin
11:17–11:22that is not there is a kind of belief and your doctrine, for all its carefulness, gives me
11:22–11:25the blindness and quietly loses the belief along the way.
11:25–11:30The blending itself might be called the error without positing any third entity beyond
11:30–11:35the two cognitions blended. Then the blending is either itself a cognition. In which case,
11:35–11:40of what object? If not of some thing answering to silver here, which is precisely the
11:40–11:45indefinable object I am arguing for and you are trying to argue around, where the blending
11:45–11:50is not a cognition at all, in which case it cannot explain a man's hand moving eagerly
11:50–11:54toward the ground, for hands to not move at the prompting of what is not known.
11:54–11:59You have built a very fine wall around the shell, friend, and left the door open on both
11:59–12:00sides.
12:00–12:03Act 4 Neither real nor unreal
12:03–12:09Vacus Barty rises and comes down from the teacher's seat, level with the assembly.
12:09–12:14schools have tried, honestly, to explain the shell without paying the price I ask, and both have
12:14–12:19quietly paid it after all. In smaller coin, let me now say plainly what I think happened when
12:19–12:24that man reached for silver that was not there, and let the haul test it as harshly as it tested
12:24–12:29the rest. The silver he saw was not real, for if it were, his cognition would rightly take the
12:29–12:36form shell or, at furthest reach, silver, back in the market, never silver here. No true thing
12:36–12:41can be. At one and the same time, itself and located where it demonstrably is not, nor
12:41–12:46was the silver simply unreal, nothing whatsoever, on the same footing as a hare's horn or the
12:46–12:52son of a barren woman, for the utterly nonexistent never enters experience at all. No one, not
12:52–12:56once in the history of the world, has reached eagerly toward a hare's horn believing
12:56–13:00he saw one gleaming on the ground. Whatever gleamed at him was something sufficient to
13:00–13:01move his hand.
13:01–13:06then say it was both real and unreal at once and be done with the paradox honestly instead
13:06–13:08of inventing a third word to hide inside.
13:08–13:13I cannot, and here is why, stated as plainly as I can manage.
13:13–13:17Real and unreal are not two shades on a single scale that a thing might mix, like grey mixing
13:17–13:22black and white, their direct contradictory's, exhaustive of the field between them, to
13:22–13:27affirm one is already, in the same breath, to deny the other, a single thing cannot
13:27–13:32been at once affirmed and denied under the very same respect without the sentence collapsing
13:32–13:38into noise, so the silver was neither wholly real, nor wholly unreal, nor a coherent mixture
13:38–13:44of both. It was any of Iconea, indefinable in terms of that very distinction, appearing
13:44–13:49with all the vividness of the real, resting on nothing that could sustain it as real,
13:49–13:52and vanishing the instant a steadier light corrected it.
13:52–13:56A pleasing formula for a coin that was never really missing from anyone's purse.
13:56–14:00But why should I trust it as a key to anything larger than a merchant's shelf?
14:00–14:05Because the very sane three-part test applies, without needing to be altered by so much as a word,
14:05–14:08to the whole of the world you are standing in as you ask me that question.
14:08–14:13Consider the mirage. A traveller crossing hot sand sees water shimmering ahead.
14:13–14:19Not memory alone, for it is seen now, before him. Not simple truth, for a thirsty man who
14:19–14:23ran toward it and tried to drink what finds sand in his mouth and nothing else, the water is
14:23–14:30there. Doing exactly what the silver did. Vivid, located, ungraspable, indefiable, now extend
14:30–14:35the same reasoning one step further. And you reach the very argument this whole bouquet.
14:35–14:40This whole inquiry was built to carry you toward the body you call yours, the senses
14:40–14:46through which you argue with me, this whole, this lamp, this evening itself. All of it
14:46–14:51is new, arising and changing before our eyes. The way the mirage water was new the instant
14:51–14:56the light struck the sand just so, and all of it is superimposed, exactly as the miragewater
14:56–15:01and the shell-silver were superimposed, upon a substratum that does not itself change,
15:01–15:06the single, conscious self that was present, unaltered, to the seeing of your boyhood
15:06–15:11body and the seeing of the body you wear tonight, the whole visible, tangible, arguable world
15:11–15:17stands to the self exactly as the silver stood to the shell, neither ultimately real,
15:17–15:23a steadier vision dissolves it without a trace, nor simply un-rhewal, since here we both are,
15:23–15:24using it to argue.
15:24–15:28Then when the merchant corrects the fool at the market and the fool's eyes clear and
15:28–15:31the shell is merely a shell again, you are telling me that is a small ordinary rehearsal
15:31–15:35of the one correction, all of us sooner or later must undergo.
15:35–15:39That is exactly what I am telling you, the whole of this science, the whole of the
15:39–15:44Bammati, if you will let an old commentator name his own book and his own hall, is nothing
15:44–15:49more than the slow, patient trimming of the lamp, so that when we finally do look down
15:49–15:54at what we have been calling silver our whole lives, we see, without flinching and without
15:54–16:00loss. That it was a shell, and, being a shell and nothing more, was never in the first place
16:00–16:03a thing our happiness ever actually depended on.
16:03–16:09A long stillness, the prapaka and the nayaka exchange a glance but do not speak, such
16:09–16:15Tradharu returns and picks up the shell from beside the door, turning it once in the lamplight
16:15–16:21before setting it down again. No one in this hall tonight argued that the man was right
16:21–16:27to reach for Silver. The argument was only ever about where the Silver was while he was wrong,
16:27–16:33and that argument, once you have followed it all the way to its end, turns out to have been asking
16:33–16:39the largest question Philosophy knows how to ask, wearing the smallest possible disguise.
16:39–16:45Vaikarspati misra did not invent the shell. Every tradition represented in this hall inherited
16:45–16:52it from the same old example. Warned smooth by centuries of hands turning it over exactly as I
16:52–16:58have just turned it over now. What he did was refuse to let anyone leave the hall until they
16:58–17:04had said plainly what they thought had happened in the half-second before the mistake was caught.
17:04–17:09If you go home tonight turning the same question over in your own hands,
17:09–17:13the play has done what the commentary that inspired it was written to do.
17:13–17:21Exhumed Omnis, the lamp is carried out last and the shell is left as it was found beside the door.

Plain text

Setting a debating hall, a servant carries in a lamp at dusk and in the failing light, sets down beside the door a coil of rope and an arm's length from it, a small conch shell washed white by years of handling, props for an argument not yet noticed by the assembly. Satradhara enters. Every debate needs a mistake to start from, and this one has two, lying by the door where you can see them if you look a rope and a shell. In bad light, a man once mistook the rope for a snake and leapt back with his heart pounding, though no snake was ever there. Another, reaching for a coin, mistook a shell for a piece of silver, and his hand closed with pleasure on nothing. Every school in this hall agrees the man was wrong. What they cannot agree on is what happened when he was wrong where, if anywhere, the silver was while he was seeing it. Vikas Bhati, Mishra, spent a lifetime's commentary on this single hinge because he saw that the answer to what is a mistake and the answer to what is the world turn out on inspection to be the same question asked twice. Watch the shell. It will not leave the stage until the debate is finished with it. Act 1 The voice that says aye, Vakarspati is seated. The object that enters and bows. Before you come, Embram and to us is something worth inquiring into. A courier answer a plainer difficulty. Inquiry exists for what is doubtful or for what is useful to no one's doubt is settled. But no one doubts his own existence. The child, the sage, the beast in the field, every creature that has ever drawn breath knows itself as aye, instantly, without proof, without a moment's hesitation. If the self is already the best known thing in the world, on what possible ground do you propose to inquire into it as though it were hidden? You have stated the objection better than most who bring it, and I will not blunt its edge. It is true. No one doubts a my, or a my not. But notice what you have proven and what you have not. You have proven that something answering to I is known beyond doubt. You have not proven that we know what that something is. A man may be certain a face is looking back at him in a dark room and be entirely wrong about whose face it is. of existence and knowledge of nature are two different achievements, and the entire quarrel of this act lies in the gap between them. Then show me the gap. What, in the plain experience of I, could possibly be mistaken? Consider what the word I is made to carry in ordinary speech. I am thin. I am going. I am blind. Each ties thy to the body, if the body itself were the referent of I, a man who knew his boyhood body and his aged body, two bodies sharing not one hair, not one tooth, not But one grain of skin in common across sixty years, could never say, with the confidence he does say it, I, who played in my father's lap, now hold my grandson in mind. Nothing continuous links those two bodies, except the eye that claims them both, and a thing that persists through what changes, and not itself be the changing thing. No more than the thread running through a garland is one of the flowers strung upon it. A dreamer, then, might answer you that I have dreamed I wore a king's body, jeweled and tall and woken to find this same short ordinary frame. If the dream self is a different self from the waking one, your thread has already snapped. On the contrary, you have handed me my own example before I could reach for it. The dreamer wakes and says, I am not a king. I am a man, the kingly body is what gets cancelled by waking, while the sense of I that owned both the dream and the waking equally is cancelled by nothing at all. A man who by yogic power takes on a tiger's form does not. In that form, cease to experience himself as the same one who was a man a moment before. body after body is put on and shed like a traveller is changing coats, the traveller is not thereby proven to be one of the coats. Then let the senses be the substratum of eye, if not the body for surely the eye that saw is not the hand that now touches. And yet I say, without a flicker of doubt, what I saw, I now touch, one abridging two different instruments, exactly as one abridged two different bodies a moment ago. The senses are instruments of the knower, they cannot also be the knower they serve, more than the axe can be the woodsman who swings it. Grant all this, I still do not see what remains to be inquired into. You have only relocated I from body to something behind the body, call it consciousness, and be done. Here is the second half of your original objection. And it is the sharper half, you are right that it existed, and I saved it for its proper place. Inquiry is pointless where knowledge serves no purpose, but consider the experience of that every creature has is an experience of a limited thing. I am in this room, I am small, I suffer this grief and not that one. The scriptures which speak of the self, as a Q-truty, as a M-Riti, the old epics, describes something that shares none of those limits, infinite, undivided, a single and broken mass of consciousness and bliss. Either the everyday I and the self of the scriptures are the same reality wrongly seen, where there are simply two different things and the scriptures are lying. If they are the same reality wrongly seen, then everything turns on the single word wrongly, and until we understand what wrongness itself is, we cannot know whether scripture or everyday experience has the truer claim on us. That is not a settled question. That is the whole of what remains to inquire into. Then the entire edifice you are building rests on knowing what an error is. It does, which is why I will not move one step further toward Brahman until that question has has been fought to its floor, here, in this hall, by every school willing to defend an account of it. Bring your strongest opponents, by what rather lose this argument honestly than win it by leaving the hardest part for later. Act 2. The Shell in the Half-Light. The lamp by the door is trimmed brighter. The Shell, still lying where the servant set it, is now visible to the Hall. The Naeikah logician rises. Since you have thrown the floor open, Akaria, let me close it quickly. A man sees that shell and poor light and cries silver. What has happened is not mysterious, silver is a real thing existing somewhere in the world. An emergent shop, in a coin in his own memory and his cognition has simply misapplied that real silver to this location, mistaking one existing thing for another existing thing standing in its place. Nothing indefinable is required. Error is simply any athekaiadi, a real object, wrongly placed. A tidy answer, magician, and I will treat it exactly as tidally as it deserves. Tell me first, on your account, does his cognition apprehend the shell at all? Only confusingly, its thisness is grasped, but its shell nature is mist, owing to some defect in the eye or the light. And the silver he sees so vividly, where, at that moment, does it actually exist? In the market, elsewhere, real as ever, his cognition merely reaches a cross-distance and misapplies it here, through the defect. All, what extraordinary good fortune poor cognition possesses, that it can reach all the way to the merchant's shop and drag a piece of silver bodily into this man's hand. And yet still be called nothing more than an ordinary case of getting a location wrong. Consider what your own school teaches elsewhere. A cause can only be blocked from producing its proper effect by a defect. A defect cannot manufacture in it the power to produce some other effect entirely far into its nature. A parched, fire scorched, sugarcane seed does not. Missing its proper power, sprout a banana stalk instead, yet you ask me to believe that a defective eye, blocked from its proper task of showing a man a shell, somehow acquires the entirely different power of hauling real silver across a city and setting it down in his palm. That is not a small defect, that is a miracle wearing the modest clothing of an error. Then say only that the form of remembered silver arises and is misapplied here, not the silver itself traveling bodily. Then you have already abandoned one real thing cognized as another, which was your whole doctrine, and slid halfway into my own house without paying rent. If it is a mere form, arising from memory and misapplied, tell me plainly. Is that form silver, or is it not? If it is truly silver, my earlier question returns in full force. Silver cannot intelligibly be here, an object which is not silver, without the very contradiction you set out to avoid. If it is not truly silver, then you have quietly granted me everything, for that is exactly what I mean by any Avakinia, indefinable, neither simply real nor simply unreal, and you have arrived at my conclusion by the scenic route, complaining about the view the entire way. The assembly, a low ripple of laughter, quickly suppressed. I have answered this objection at length elsewhere in the Nyaknika and will not rehearse the whole of it standing here in the evening cold. Nor need you, you have conceded the essential point and a debater who yields the center of a citadel need not also surrender the outer wall before witnesses. Sit. Friend, you have argued honestly, which is worth more in this hall than winning." Act III The Vanishing Difference The Prabhikara M. I. Macron M. A. Macron letter 1 E4 3 S. I. K. S. steps forward, more cautious than the logician who preceded him. I watched my colleague Silver Dragged across the city and I will not repeat his error. I posit nothing so extravagant, what actually occurs when a shell is mistaken. Is this These two cognitions arise together, a bare perception of this, here and now, and a memory of silver, seen long ago, awakened by the shell's faint gleam, the defect lies only in this the man fails to notice that one of these is a present perception, and the other a mere memory, he runs the two together, unmarked, and speaks as though he perceived one single thing, there is no third, indefinable entity anywhere in this story, only ordinary perception, memory, and an ordinary failure to keep them apart, call it Aki-Ati not a false cognition at all, only a missing cognition—the missing awareness of a distinction. A far more careful doctrine than the last, and I will grant the complement of a hard question rather than a quick one. Tell me, on your account is the perception this, bear, present, immediate, in any way false? Not in the least. It is simple and entire accurate. So far as it bows— And the memory of silver, is it in itself, false? No more than any memory is false. It correctly recalls silver once seen. The fault lies only in a blending, never in either ingredient. Then hear the difficulty this creates for you, and it is fatal. Not merely inconvenient. The whole world, without exception, describes this experience in a single sentence. This is silver, not this, and, separately, I recall silver, a plain, unified, first person's claim of identity, spoken with exactly the same confident grammar as this is a pot. If what truly occurred were too accurate cognitions standing innocently side by side, merely unlabeled, whence comes the positive, mistaken assertion of oneness between them, two true things standing near each other, even if their nearness goes unnoticed, do not thereby generate a false claim that they are identical. You have accounted for a failure to distinguish, you have not accounted for the man's eager reach toward the ground to to pick the silver up, missing a difference is a kind of blindness. Reaching for a coin that is not there is a kind of belief and your doctrine, for all its carefulness, gives me the blindness and quietly loses the belief along the way. The blending itself might be called the error without positing any third entity beyond the two cognitions blended. Then the blending is either itself a cognition. In which case, of what object? If not of some thing answering to silver here, which is precisely the indefinable object I am arguing for and you are trying to argue around, where the blending is not a cognition at all, in which case it cannot explain a man's hand moving eagerly toward the ground, for hands to not move at the prompting of what is not known. You have built a very fine wall around the shell, friend, and left the door open on both sides. Act 4 Neither real nor unreal Vacus Barty rises and comes down from the teacher's seat, level with the assembly. schools have tried, honestly, to explain the shell without paying the price I ask, and both have quietly paid it after all. In smaller coin, let me now say plainly what I think happened when that man reached for silver that was not there, and let the haul test it as harshly as it tested the rest. The silver he saw was not real, for if it were, his cognition would rightly take the form shell or, at furthest reach, silver, back in the market, never silver here. No true thing can be. At one and the same time, itself and located where it demonstrably is not, nor was the silver simply unreal, nothing whatsoever, on the same footing as a hare's horn or the son of a barren woman, for the utterly nonexistent never enters experience at all. No one, not once in the history of the world, has reached eagerly toward a hare's horn believing he saw one gleaming on the ground. Whatever gleamed at him was something sufficient to move his hand. then say it was both real and unreal at once and be done with the paradox honestly instead of inventing a third word to hide inside. I cannot, and here is why, stated as plainly as I can manage. Real and unreal are not two shades on a single scale that a thing might mix, like grey mixing black and white, their direct contradictory's, exhaustive of the field between them, to affirm one is already, in the same breath, to deny the other, a single thing cannot been at once affirmed and denied under the very same respect without the sentence collapsing into noise, so the silver was neither wholly real, nor wholly unreal, nor a coherent mixture of both. It was any of Iconea, indefinable in terms of that very distinction, appearing with all the vividness of the real, resting on nothing that could sustain it as real, and vanishing the instant a steadier light corrected it. A pleasing formula for a coin that was never really missing from anyone's purse. But why should I trust it as a key to anything larger than a merchant's shelf? Because the very sane three-part test applies, without needing to be altered by so much as a word, to the whole of the world you are standing in as you ask me that question. Consider the mirage. A traveller crossing hot sand sees water shimmering ahead. Not memory alone, for it is seen now, before him. Not simple truth, for a thirsty man who ran toward it and tried to drink what finds sand in his mouth and nothing else, the water is there. Doing exactly what the silver did. Vivid, located, ungraspable, indefiable, now extend the same reasoning one step further. And you reach the very argument this whole bouquet. This whole inquiry was built to carry you toward the body you call yours, the senses through which you argue with me, this whole, this lamp, this evening itself. All of it is new, arising and changing before our eyes. The way the mirage water was new the instant the light struck the sand just so, and all of it is superimposed, exactly as the miragewater and the shell-silver were superimposed, upon a substratum that does not itself change, the single, conscious self that was present, unaltered, to the seeing of your boyhood body and the seeing of the body you wear tonight, the whole visible, tangible, arguable world stands to the self exactly as the silver stood to the shell, neither ultimately real, a steadier vision dissolves it without a trace, nor simply un-rhewal, since here we both are, using it to argue. Then when the merchant corrects the fool at the market and the fool's eyes clear and the shell is merely a shell again, you are telling me that is a small ordinary rehearsal of the one correction, all of us sooner or later must undergo. That is exactly what I am telling you, the whole of this science, the whole of the Bammati, if you will let an old commentator name his own book and his own hall, is nothing more than the slow, patient trimming of the lamp, so that when we finally do look down at what we have been calling silver our whole lives, we see, without flinching and without loss. That it was a shell, and, being a shell and nothing more, was never in the first place a thing our happiness ever actually depended on. A long stillness, the prapaka and the nayaka exchange a glance but do not speak, such Tradharu returns and picks up the shell from beside the door, turning it once in the lamplight before setting it down again. No one in this hall tonight argued that the man was right to reach for Silver. The argument was only ever about where the Silver was while he was wrong, and that argument, once you have followed it all the way to its end, turns out to have been asking the largest question Philosophy knows how to ask, wearing the smallest possible disguise. Vaikarspati misra did not invent the shell. Every tradition represented in this hall inherited it from the same old example. Warned smooth by centuries of hands turning it over exactly as I have just turned it over now. What he did was refuse to let anyone leave the hall until they had said plainly what they thought had happened in the half-second before the mistake was caught. If you go home tonight turning the same question over in your own hands, the play has done what the commentary that inspired it was written to do. Exhumed Omnis, the lamp is carried out last and the shell is left as it was found beside the door.

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