A Realist View Of Advaita By Chittaranjan Naik | A Summary - Part 1

Introduction

Is the world real, a mental construct, or pictures of something else? Western philosophy and the sciences have broadly three positions on how we perceive reality.

1. Representationalism (Scientific Realism or Indirect Realism) believes that the perceived world is only an internal representation of an external world; hence, it is an indirect form of reality. The brain reconstructs the neural impulses impinging on it to create a world outside. The real world remains unknown.
2. Idealism believes that the world we perceive is subjective and has no existence independent of the mind. In both the above forms, the world is mind-dependent.
3. Realism (or Naïve Realism) believes the world to be true to the representation in our brains despite paradoxically holding the stimulus-response theory of perception to be true. This view has the problem that, despite the transformative nature of perception, the world is still believed to be true to what it looks like. Hence, the term naïve is applied.

 In the first two positions, if there is a mind-dependent world, then what is the ontological status or the true reality of the world? All representationalist systems cannot thus effectively address the topic of ontology (reality), as the real world is always beyond our comprehension.

The standard Western paradigm is that light falls on an object, reflected light enters through the eyes on the retina, neural impulses travel to the brain, an image is formed, and the perceiver ‘sees.’ The same is true for all the other senses, too. In the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception’, the perceived world becomes only a representation of the external world. In Kantian philosophy, the original unknown is the ‘noumenon’ (in modern parlance, ‘the non-linguistic’ world), and the known constructed reality is the ‘phenomenon’. Representation is the contemporary scientific view and gets the term ‘Scientific Realism’ or ‘Indirect Realism’, and forms the basis of both philosophy and neuroscience.

In contrast, the six systems of Indian philosophy have a clear stand of a ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism’. There is an active theory of perception where the perceiver, central in the scheme of things, goes out and reaches the object in the world. This is the ‘contact theory of perception’ of Indian philosophy. This gives direct information about the world as it exists, without any construction. Despite the pinnacle of philosophy being Advaita, there is plenty of misconception regarding the ontology of Advaita, especially when it says that jagat (world) is a mithyā (an illusion). What does this mean? Is it denying the reality of the world, equating it to the illusion of a magician?

The answer is a resounding negative. Śrī Chittaranjan Naik, engineer, scientist, eminent philosopher, and author of two books on Indian philosophy (‘Natural Realism and Contact Theory of Perception’ and ‘On the Existence of the Self’), explains the ontological view of Advaita in a brilliant series of articles published first at advaita.org.uk. Using the works of Śrī Adi Shankara, especially Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya, he discusses the realism of Advaita in great detail and shows how it does not stand in contradiction to the other schools of Indian darśanas.

Not only that, the series of articles dissects clean many of the key ideas of Advaita philosophy and the problems due to its incorrect interpretations, sometimes even by Advaita proponents. The series of essays is a must-read for understanding Advaita in a comprehensive manner.

This article and its sequel are a summary of the original series giving the main points of his article, which hopefully should be a stepping stone to explore the original essays and other works of Śrī Chittaranjan Naik. The author of this summary does not claim expertise in this area and only wants to continue Naik ji’s efforts to simplify some of the most complex Indian Darshana concepts, especially for the beginners and those who are completely unaware.

Unlike Western philosophy, which perhaps is of use to the philosophers strictly, Indian darśanas have a ‘utilitarian value’ for every single individual because the final goal of every darśana is the mokṣa of the individual. Thus, Indian philosophy has an intense practical benefit of transporting a person from bondage to complete freedom and from ignorance to wisdom.

The idea of excluding Indian darśanas in the name of secularism from Indian educational curricula by calling it “religion” has been the poorest understanding of Indian culture by our thinkers and leaders.

It has resulted in the great deracination and derooting of the Indians from their strong traditions. Perhaps it was a cultural and intellectual suicide for the country by ignoring Indian philosophies.

This article and its sequel conclude with a link to the original series, which includes an extensive bibliography for a deeper exploration.

The Reality Divide - A Historical Perspective

The ancients looked at reality as a natural world they saw, experienced, and lived in. A modern realist asserts that the world is independent of the perceiver, while an idealist reduces it to the mind. Contemporary cognitive science talks about two worlds: one, a qualia-filled consciousness of “subjective” world experience, and the other, the world of “objective” independent entities. In contrast, there is the more vexed duality, or reality divide, where most Advaitins term the experiential world an illusion or a dreamlike “product” of consciousness.

The nihilistic idealism of Buddhist philosophy first created the duality of the “outside world” and “inside world” only to negate the “outside world” as an impossibility. Logic dictates that when one pole of an artificially constructed duality collapses, the entire duality also collapses. Mimamsa philosophers dissolved this artificial duality and reverted to a logically meaningful world we see and experience.

In Western philosophy, John Locke formally divided the world of “secondary” qualities we perceive and the world of “primary” qualities forever beyond our senses. Bishop Berkeley, by demolishing the world of independently existing objects, helped establish the stage of idealism in Western philosophy. Idealism makes the outside world either a secondarily transformed representation in the mind or a sole play in the mind. Idealism remains an idea-tized island, sequestered from the imaged “outside world.” Modern philosophy across its history (British empiricism, German idealism, American pragmatism, and continental existentialism) and even contemporary science have not been able to revert to the only natural world that we experience and live in.

Edmund Husserl nearly succeeded in solving this riddle, but the scientific community found his phenomenological reduction too complex, arguing that philosophising about the “outside world” is futile. Wittgenstein, following Gottlieb Frege, came closest to resolving the reality divide by attempting to develop an ideal language to avoid the pitfalls of language misuse. Wittgenstein developed a full-bodied philosophy of language in which language and the world are intimately connected to each other. Few understood the ramifications of his philosophy. The reality divide continued to haunt philosophy.

Science borrowed many concepts from philosophy: the atomic theory (Epicureans); the belief in natural cause explanation for all phenomena (Lucretius and Bacon); space as a relation between mass points (Leibniz). Yet, science has never examined its own conceptions with philosophical clarity. The automatic approach is the positivism of August Comte, who posited three stages of development: the intuitive stage (religion), the speculative stage (philosophy), and the rational empirical stage (science). Many of its ideas regarding doing science, starting with the “verifiability” criteria, have repeatedly undergone changes. The reality divide remains an implicit premise.

Nyāya, the common platform for philosophical debate, a philosophy of logos, and intricately linked to language, never allowed this debate in Indian philosophy. Reality remains as the world that we see and experience. Yet, the idealism of Advaita gave a vision of the world as “illusion.” Ill-understood, this was the truth that the world is not independent of the perceiving consciousness. It is an epiphany, a point of spiralling into the numinous ground of Self. A real world does not mean that it is independent of consciousness. It merely means that we employ the natural locution that language has given us.

The “unreal” is known only by knowing the “real.” One is asleep to meanings until the Self, in which all meanings lie, is known. Advaita is a razor’s edge. The notion of truth and the discriminative capacity lie within us, by which we seek to know the world and understand the shruti. A philosopher must explain the world and not negate it. Sublation is seeing a new meaning in an experience, not negating it.

The Preamble to the Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya

The adhyāsa-bhāṣya of Shankara’s preamble to the Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya is popularly believed to point to the unreality of the world, but this is fallacious. The subject matter is the superimposition between the Self and non-Self. This superimposition is avidyā. Ascertaining the real entity by removing the superimposition is vidyā and finally facilitates Self-knowledge. There is no statement that implies the world is false.

One of the most famous illustrations in Indian darśanas that highlights superimposition is the “snake in the rope.” A dim light makes one think that a rope is a snake. The instant light falls, knowledge dawns, the snake vanishes, and the rope remains. Superimposition is the appearance of one thing as another, where an unreal thing appears as real. The object is unreal because the real thing does not exist at the place and time of its cognition. This is not a statement of absolute nonexistence. In the superimposition of the non-Self on the real Self, the non-Self is unreal, but it is never absolutely non-existent.

Shankara mentions the theories of error in other schools.

1. Anyathākhyāti (Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika): The error from the rope is transported to a real snake that exists elsewhere due to either a defect of environment or instrument of cognition. Advaita rejects this because the perception of the erroneous snake should take us to the snake present elsewhere.
2. Akhyāti (Mīmāṃsa): The error is transported to a defect in memory of the real snake. Advaita rejects this too since memory is never without a reference to place and time.
3. Satkhyāti (Viśiṣṭādvaita): All objects of cognition are real since there is never a cognition without a real cognitum. Advaitins reject this theory because it does not explain why only a snake should be seen in the rope rather than a cow or an elephant (as everything exists in everything else).
4. Sadasatkhyāti (Sāṃkhya-Yoga) is based on false knowledge not corresponding to its real form. The snake, real elsewhere, is unreal when comprehended in this rope. Advaita does not strictly reject this.

It is only in the nihilistic Buddhist theories that we come across the absolute unreality of even the objects of error. Asatkhyāti (Buddhist Madhyamikas) says that the non-existent snake appears on the non-existent rope. Advaita rejects it since the idea that “all effects are non-existent” goes against experience. Ātmakhyāti is the Buddhist Vijñānavāda theory of error where a past impression leads to a mixing up of a simultaneous flow of external ‘this’ and internal snake. Advaita rejects this, as Buddhists here are really assuming the existence of an external thing even while they deny it. The unreality of the “son of a barren woman,” an absolutely meaningless term, is different from the unreality of the “snake in the rope.” The world in Advaita is unreal, like the latter. Only the Buddhist doctrines say that the world is absolutely unreal.

An error occurs when there is a concealment of the true nature of the object, either due to a defect of the sense organs or the environment. Vaidika darśanas postulate two other conditions for error to occur:

1. A likeness between the real and the unreal object. People mistake a rope for a snake, not a cow.
2. The unreal object appearance is based on the reality of the object itself, though the locus differs. A rope can be mistaken for a snake because real snakes exist.

However, these conditional factors for empirical error are impossible to explain the non-Self being superimposed on the Self. One, insentient, and the other, sentient, are as contradictory as light and dark. This superimposition is hence inexplicable, but this is the natural (naisargika) state from a beginningless past.

What is unreal is also somehow and perplexingly the real. To read the bhāṣya of Shankara with the singular notion that the world is unreal would be a sad derailment of Advaita. How can superimposition happen on the Self, which is never an object? The Vedāntin response suggests that we apprehend the Self, which is not entirely beyond comprehension, as the content of the concept ‘I’. The Self is also well known as an immediately perceived (self-revealing) entity.

In the error of the snake in the rope, the person knows the meanings of both the snake and the rope. Children superimpose the ideas of concavity and dirt on space (the sky) while not knowing the true nature of the sky. An adult who knows what ‘sky’ means can never superimpose such ideas. There is a primal dislodgement of meaning in children. The superimposition of the non-Self on Self, inexplicable or anirvacanīya, is such a primal dislodgement of meaning in Reality.

The Dream Analogy: The Illusory World and Superimposition

According to Adi Shankara, the world cannot be said to be false based on the enigmatic dream analogy where perception occurs in the absence of external things. Shankara denies the appearance of objects without real ones existing for the following reasons:

1. Waking state objects are never sublated, unlike those of the dream state. The latter state objects are sublated immediately on waking up.
2. Dream vision is a kind of memory, whereas the waking state are perceptions of objects through valid means of knowledge.
3. Objects cannot appear from mere internal impressions.
4. Objects are not unreal because they have distinguishing characteristics.

A mere analogy of a dream cannot supersede what remains empirically valid. In the Brahma Sūtra Bāṣya, Shankara asserts that one cannot dismiss the waking experience as inherently baseless, as this would contradict the experience itself. People have mistakenly, and perhaps recklessly, used the dream analogy to “prove” that the world is unreal. Advaita holds that the world is unreal in a certain sense, yet it requires illumination and reconciliation through the discriminative knowledge of the real and the unreal.

What is Being Negated?

According to Shankara, the unreality of the world and world sublation have no meaning in isolation from knowledge of the Self. The subtle and perplexing negation in Advaita is that negating without a distinctive thing to negate becomes a duality. The solution to the riddle is in discriminating what Advaita negates. The denial is the surface of the world as constituting the depth of its true nature. There is nothing finally negated because the surface is ultimately subsumed in the Reality. The sublation of the world is nothing but the knowledge of the Self that subsumes the world.

The unreality of the world is not like ‘the son of a barren woman’, for such a thing is possible ‘neither through Māya nor in reality’. Māya can possibly only ‘give birth’ to what is already existent. If we read this in juxtaposition with Shankara’s words that the Self is ‘co-extensive with all that exists within and without…’, the meaning emerging is that the denial of the world is of the surface as constituting the true depth of its nature in which it abides in identity.

Negation is of a thing’s surface posturing as the deep Self. Knowledge and the truth of the world are its life, and the seemingly lifeless world is a superficial façade of its reality. Advaita negates this ‘corpse’ of the world. The three states of Jāgrata, Svapna, and Suṣupti are characterised by the sleep of death, while the Self remains eternally awake. And in that consciousness shines the real living world.

The Advaitic Superimposition

What is the Advaitic superimposition of the world on the Brahman like a snake on a rope? Imagine one becomes aware of a brown-surfaced object barely visible above the surface of water while sitting calmly by the side of a lake. The person initially misidentifies it as a log of wood, but a sudden splash reveals it to be a crocodile. The person superimposes the log on the crocodile object, but the features, such as the “coarse brown surface”, remain authentic. With the attributes remaining unchanged, the superimposed log immediately disappeared.

The crocodile is Brahman. The log is the superimposed world. The cause of the superimposition is the concealment of avidyā. The coarse brown surface represents features of the world, which is not false. The illusion is the false log that was ‘seen’.

The attributes responsible for the error cannot disappear with knowledge. Therefore, the assertion that the world is a superimposition on Brahman necessitates a thorough examination of the constituent elements. In perceiving the world, the attributes are not false, but the false is the world as a self-subsisting independent thing. The independent world is the ‘snake’ superimposed on Reality. Thus, negation does not negate the world in so far as the world is the attributive mode of Brahman but negates the world perceived as independently subsisting.

Kārikā on the Unreality of the World

Gaudapada’s Kārikā derives the unreality of the world from syllogistic inference (anumāna). In Vaidika philosophies, inference is not new, but prior knowledge, applied to the particular instance of observation. We can infer the fire from the smoke because of the a priori concomitance between smoke and fire. Vyāpti is an invariable concomitance between two perceived objects. The Vyāpti used in the Kārikā is meant to be understood differently.

If ‘being perceived’ is an object, the perceiver witnesses both the object and its apperception. Such is possible only for the Self that remains as the unmoving witness. The Kārikā speaks from a standpoint of this extra-normal perception where the unreality of the world is a prior truth. ‘Being perceived’ bears an invariable concomitance to ‘the unreality of what is perceived’ and becomes a vyāpti for the inference. However, this is only applicable to a jñāni or a yogi.

The Kārikā, much before Mīmāṃsa, takes a different perspective on the dream than does the Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya to refute Buddhist nihilism. In the tarka-śāstra, one way of refutation is to accept a common tenet of the opponent—called the siddhānta—and then demolish the conclusion. Shankara, in his bhāṣya to the Kārikā IV.27, after the illusoriness of the world has been established in the first ten verses of the Vaitathya Prakarana, moves on directly to a refutation of the Buddhists:

If the objects cognised in both the conditions (of dream and of waking) be illusory, who cognises all these (illusory objects), and who again imagines them? Atman, the self-luminous, through the power of his own Maya, alone is the cogniser of objects (so created). This is the decision of Vedānta.

Authenticity And the Knot of the Heart

Shankaracharya places great stress on authenticity, which is relevant to the understanding of Advaita. He says it is unacceptable that a person perceives an external object through sense contacts and still says that he does not perceive it and that the object does not exist. One should accept a thing as it is revealed externally and not ’as though appearing outside’. It cannot be asserted that the perception of the waking state is false merely on the ground that it is a perception like the perception in a dream. A strong stand of this type makes it unreasonable to assume that Shankara accepts the reality of the world merely for the sake of expediency when arguing with Buddhists.

Authenticity leads us to the truth of experience. Rejecting the world is but a twisted affirmation of the world. Rejection lays the groundwork for ‘reduction’, a process in which objects transform into nothingness, impressions, or quantum phenomena. Reduction is the perpetuation of the primordial confusion between ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. The inviolable truth that “a thing is itself” is the central axiom of logic and the fundamental law of identity. Reduction, or viparyaya, contradicting the law of identity, is illogical since it mixes up the meaning of one with another. It is a corruption of the vritti whereby the object is not true to its name.

Shankara attacks this reduction when he refutes Buddhist doctrines holding that objects are internal impressions. An internal impression is not an external object. ‘Internal’ and ‘external’ are the attributions of space. Holding objects as only internal impressions is fallacious in ascribing reality to space but denying reality to objects in space. A cow is a cow and not a horse through its “cowness” more than because of any other reason.

Reduction roots in the unknowingness of the known-ness of objects. Things seen are already known. We cannot question what we don’t know. Yet, it is not known because we have questions about it. Thus, it is known, and it is not known. We cannot know it by rejecting it or bringing alien characteristics to it by way of reductions. The truth is seen through a transparent (and not warped) mind to the Witness of seeing. Reduction is a violation of the pramanas. According to the epistemological order of the pramanas, a fact of pratyaksha cannot be negated on the grounds of reason.

The law of identity directs the intellect to the Brahman. It fixes the universe ‘as it is’ in its true nature. Brahman, as the material cause, pervades the universe like the yarn pervades the cloth. Brahman is large enough to accommodate the universe as we see it. Brahman (roots: ‘brmh’ or growth with the suffix ‘man’) points to an absolute freedom from limitation.

Authenticity leads us to the infinity and not to the ‘nothingness’ of Brahman. The mind of a jīva is warped by avidyā that has ‘shrunk’ the self into the confines of the body. It is the knot of the heart that must be released. This knot has contracted the infinite into the finite. For a jīva to identify with Brahman, its consciousness must ‘expand’ to include all jīvas in the universe and the immortals of heaven. The Supreme Knowledge is the ‘expansion’ of consciousness to engulf the universe rather than its ‘compression’ into the nothingness of nihilism. The Self is All-knowing. How can one realise the Self that is All-knowing if the All has been negated?

Prelude to Ontology

Immanuel Kant questioned our use of the term ‘existence’ as a predicate. Gottlieb Frege, following Kant’s lead, formalised existence not as a predicate but as pointing to the instantiation of a concept in his symbolic framework, which later formed analytic philosophy and modern logic. Frege, countering the idealists, reasoned that ‘existence’ linguistically applies to objects as concrete facts. A variant of the ontology of presence is “existentialism”, where all things are nothing but their presence to consciousness. But the term ‘existence’ does not refer to consciousness itself. Existentialism further states that “existence precedes essence.” This doctrine dissolves everything into ‘a nothing’ behind the nature of things.

This hypothesis problematically cannot account for the recognition of sameness. No essence means no persistence in the idea of a tree being the same yesterday and today. The metaphysical need to account for sameness made the Scholastic philosophers postulate “essences”. Only by admitting universals or essences can we recognise sameness, but this negates the doctrine that ‘existence precedes essence’. Unfortunately, modern philosophy discounts scholastic philosophy.

However, Advaita affirms both the ontology of presence as well as the ontology of absence in an overarching ontology of Existence as we shall see later.

Object

The current usage of ‘object’ is something ‘concrete’ perceptible to the senses. The original meaning, more encompassing, makes no differentiation between an object both thought and perceived. The difference lies in the modes of cognition for the same object. When conceived, it is a concept, and when perceived, it is a percept. Joy, sorrow, motion, rest, doubt, and certitude are also objects. Modern philosophers have been perplexed by the padarthas of Nyāya, which includes such entities as object of cognition, instrument of cognition, discussion, etc. This is because they translate padartha as an ‘ontological category’. ‘Tattva’ and ‘padārtha’ have no exact English equivalent, but the closest could be the term ‘logos’.

An intermediate “sense” does not mediate the sacred and mystical relation between words and objects. An object is the immediate object of the word. It is therefore ‘artha’, which means both ‘meaning’ as well as ‘object’. According to Frege’s modern sense-reference theory, words possess an “intermediate sense” that refers to objects in the world. This is not logically sustainable. A word’s sense lacks meaning unless it encompasses the ‘objectness’. If the sense incorporates the objectness, it eliminates the need for a separate object as a reference. If it did, the object would have to contain something more than the objectness, and hence objectness would not define the object, which is absurd.

Mind and Object

Despite not having a separate thing called the mind, it has a sense of being internal and as the subject. It is thus an internal tattva — antaḥkaraṇa — that, apart from the objects cogitated, is inferred to be the internal instrument of cognition. The mind itself is an object because it is a reference to the word “mind”. This duality generates a kind of false duality. Things cogitated by the mind are ‘ideas’, and things perceived by bodies become ‘objects’.

There is no duality between mind and objects. The object is the target of the mind, and the mind, as the internal instrument, is the other side, like the concave and the convex. However, when we contemplate the mind itself, it functions as both an object and an internal instrument within our thinking. Modern philosophy cannot seem to bridge the seeming divide between mind and body, leading to problems such as ‘the ghost in the machine’ and the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. This roots in the stimulus-response theory of cognition, which divides reality into the ‘outside world of objects’ and ‘the internal world of sensations’.

Refutation of the Stimulus-Response Theory of Cognition

The stimulus-response theory of perception is a persistent dogma. Accordingly, the sensory signals that impinge upon the human sensorium, which is a tabula rasa, invoke it into a responsive state. This has remained unexamined except indirectly through Husserl’s phenomenology, which showed that we reach objects directly without mediation.

The brain-centric model postulates the brain as the cause of perception and ideation. A logical circularity ensues because the brain is also a perceived or ideated thing. Logic forces us to look at the idea that we reach objects directly without mediation. A valid theory of cognition must avoid the logical circularity of the stimulus-response model while accounting for the observed causal relationships. The refutation demonstrates that there is no transforming mechanism between the perceiver and the perceived world. Thus, there is the seer and the seen, and the seer sees the seen intimately and directly.

Thus, in the physical world, a Transcending Causality that orders phenomena manifests the brain as the seat of a certain causal nexus. The brain becomes a ‘cause’ of perception bestowed upon it by the Real Cause. The neural processes are more like a correlation to the world and not the cause.

The Individual and the World

There is thus one continuum of Consciousness in which mind, body, external objects, internal thoughts, and their causal relationships exist. The body, as the seat of our experience, is marked off from the rest of the world as ‘I am this’. The individual or jīvātman is a luminous clearing within the world circumscribed by the mind and body. Brahman creates the body as the abode of the jīvātman and bestows the causal nexus between the senses and the objects.

The jīvātman’s power affects the world only through the body. The jīvātman cannot determine the world into being. Even the dream-objects are brought forth by that same bestowing Cause. The jīvātman cannot create objects; it can only affect the objects that it already finds around it as the furniture of the world. The world, endowed with objects of sense perception prior to the individual’s determinations, is reached out to by the jīvātman with the body. Only the Transcendental Cause projects the world as a sensual manifold of objects by its vikṣepa śakti.

On Perception (Pratyakṣa)

If sensing is from outside to inside, we should see objects inside the body, not in space. To say that the object is perceived “as-if” it is there, is illogical since it lays the ground for anything to be anything else by effacing all differences. The only logically sustainable thesis is that objects are perceived through contact between the instruments of cognition and the object. This is the Advaita theory of perception. The mind and the senses reach out, contact the object, and comprehension takes place in the intelligent light of consciousness. We perceive an object as it is, without any transformation. An inconceivable ‘outside world’ collapses. Advaitic metaphysics dissolves the schism between mind and body and between primary and secondary qualities.

This discussion will be continued in Part 2 of the series.

The original series of articles can be found here.