Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/167

 v] Ultimate goal IS I and nirval)a is that in which all root desires (vasami) manifesting themselves in knowledge are destroyed and the mind with know- ledge and perceptions, making false creations, ceases to work. This cannot be called death, for it will not have any rebirth and it can- not be called destruction, for only compounded things (sa1!zsk.rta) suffer destruction, so that it is different from either death or destruction. This nirvaI)a is different from that of the sravakas and the pratyekabuddhas for they are satisfied to call that state nirvaI)a, in which by the knowledge of the general characteristics of all things (transitoriness and misery) they are not attached to things and cease to make erroneous judgments I . Thus we see that there is no cause (in the sense of ground) of all these phenomena as other heretics maintain. When it is said that the world is maya or illusion, what is meant to be emphasized is this, that there is no cause, no ground. The pheno- mena that seem to originate, stay, and be destroyed are mere constructions of tainted imagination, and the tathata or thatness is nothing but the turning away of this constructive activity or nature of the imagination (vikalpa) tainted with the associations of beginningless root desires (vClsanii) 2. The tathata has no separate reality from illusion, but it is illusion itself when the course of the construction of illusion has ceased. It is therefore also spoken of as that which is cut off or detached from the mind (cittavimukta), for here there is no construction of imagination (sarvakalpa1zaviraltitam )3. Sautrantika Theory of Perception. Dharmottara (847 A.D.), a commentator of Dharmakirtti's4 (about 635 A.D.) Nyayabilldu, a Sautrantika logical and episte- mological work, describes right knowledge (samyagjiialla) as an invariable antecedent to the accomplishment of all that a man I La1lkiivatiirasutra, p. 100. 2 Ibid. p. 10 9. 3 This account of the Vijiiiinaviida school is collected mainly from Laiikiivatiira- sutra, as no other authentic work of the Vijfiiinaviida school is available. Hindu accounts and criticisms of this school may be had in such books as Kumarila's Sloka viirt/ika or Sankara's bhiiya, II. ii, etc. Asanga's 1VlaJllzyiinasutriilal!lklzra deals more with tht; duties concerning the career of a saint (Bodhisattz'a) than with the metaphysics of the system. 4 Dharmaki:rtti calls himself an adherent of Vijfiiinaviida in his Santlzniintara- siddhi, a treatise on solipsism, but his j1lyiiyabindu seems rightly to have been considered by the author of Nyiiyabindutikii!ippani (p. 19) as being written from the Sautrantika point of view.