Page:A History of Indian Philosophy Vol 1.djvu/241

 VII] Interpretations of Bhiku and Vacaspati 225 reason why purua should be deprived of such a fitness at the time of emancipation, and thus there would be no emancipation at all, for the fitness being in the purua, he could not be divested of it, and he would continue to enjoy the experiences represented in the buddhi for ever. Vijfiana Bhiku thus holds that there is a real contact of the purua with the buddhi state in any cognitive state. Such a contact of the purua and the buddhi does not necessarily mean that the former will be liable to change on account of it, for contact and change are not synonymous. Change means the rise of new qualities. It is the buddhi which suffers changes, and when these changes are reflected in the purua, there is the notion of a person or experiencer in the purua, and when the purua is reflected back in the buddhi the buddhi state appears as a conscious state. The second, is the difference between Vacaspati and Bhiku as regards the nature of the perceptual process. Bhiku thinks that the senses can directly perceive the determinate qualities of things without any intervention of manas, whereas Vacaspati ascribes to manas the power of arranging the sense-data in a definite order and of making the indeterminate sense-data determinate. With him the first stage of cognition is the stage when indeterminate sense materials are first presented, at the next stage there is assimilation, differentiation, and association by which the indeterminate materials are ordered and classified by the activity of manas called sarpkalpa which coordinates the indeterminate sense materials into determinate perceptual and conceptual forms as class notions with particular characteristics. Bhiku who supposes that the determinate character of things is directly perceived by the senses has necessarily to assign a sub- ordinate position to manas as being only the faculty of desire, doubt, and imagination. I t may not be out of place to mention here that there are one or two passages in Vacaspati's commentary on the Sa1!lklzya kiirikii which seem to suggest that he considered the ego (ahm!l- ktira) as producing the subjective series of the senses and the objective series of the external world by a sort of desire or will, but he did not work out this doctrine, and it is therefore not necessary to enlarge upon it. There is also a difference of view with regard to the evolution of the tanmatras from the mahat; for contrary to the view of Tfytisabhaya and Vijftana Bhiku etc. Vacaspati holds that from the mahat there was aharpkara and