[Advaita-l] Nyayasudha Objections 1

Srinath Vedagarbha svedagarbha at gmail.com
Tue Feb 16 15:00:55 CST 2016


On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 11:54 PM, Anand Hudli via Advaita-l <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> >pada "nirviShESha" conveying negation of pratiyOgi viShESha-s here in its
> >mukhyartha form. How's that its lakShyArtha being Brahman? Unless you know
> >Brahman apriori and its attributelessness apriori from a different source
> >other than that pada itself, by hearing "nirviShESha" will not imply such
> >Brahman.
>
> Even in the case of "gangAyAM ghoShaH", unless a person already knows that
> there is a river called gangA, there is no lakShyArtha required.


But that person was already introduced about river ganga by the pada
"gangA" by its primary meaning.


> Such a
> person may think that there is a place called "gangA" and there is a
> village in it. He/she may not realize that it is the river bank that is the
> place where the village exists, not the river gangA itself.


Correct, that is the case only if there is no pada in the dictionary which
denotes vastu river in its primary meaning. But it was not the case here as
we have pada "gangA". This is the issue in case of Brahman as we have no
single pada which is capable of denoting the artha in its primary meaning.



> The word
> "agangA" may indicate a river that is not gangA or something different.
> There is no way of pinpointing a place as "agangA", nor can we take the
> "mukhyArtha" of "agangA", because "a village not on the gangA" will not
> yield any information about where the village is.
>
>
Yes, using the mukhyArtha of the pada "agangA" in that sentence will lead
to abOdhakatva dOSha. But using its lakShyArtha as indicating something
"other than" ganga will also leads to assiddhi dOSha. This is because that
lakshya  "something different" could be existing or non-existing. There is
no reason to assume it is referring to existing vastu. Extending this
to lakShyArtha of "nirviShEsha", your argument that it denotes to Brahman
is not correct because the lakshya vastu Brahman should known to exist.
That knowing is not possible unless there exist a pada by its primary
meaning Brahman will be siddha.

If I understand correctly, this is the gist of dvaitin's interpretation of
sUtra "Om ikshayetE na aShabdam Om" -- meaning Brahman is not
aShabda/avAchya because of hEtu "it is known". Given that Brahamn cannot be
known by pratyaksha and anumAna, it leads to only option Aagama. Since
aagma is shabda based, hence it is not correct to say Brahamn is avAchya by
all pada-s in their mukhyArtha.


/sv


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