illuminates the crowding,
bustling knowledge which is incessantly changing its form in
accordance with the objects with which it comes in touch. This
light of intelligence is the same that finds its manifestation in
consciousness as the "I," the changeless entity amidst all the
fluctuations of the changeful procession of knowledge. How this
element of light which is foreign to the substance of knowledge

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[Footnote 1: See _Nyayamanjari_ on prama@na.]

415

relates itself to knowledge, and how knowledge itself takes it up
into itself and appears as conscious, is the most difficult point
of the Sa@mkhya epistemology and metaphysics. The substance
of knowledge copies the external world, and this copy-shape of
knowledge is again intelligized by the pure intelligence (_puru@sa_)
when it appears as conscious. The forming of the buddhi-shape
of knowledge is thus the prama@na (instrument and process of
knowledge) and the validity or invalidity of any of these shapes
is criticized by the later shapes of knowledge and not by the
external objects (_svata@h-prama@nya_ and _svata@h-aprama@nya_). The
prama@na however can lead to a prama or right knowledge only
when it is intelligized by the puru@sa. The puru@sa comes in touch
with buddhi not by the ordinary means of physical contact but
by what may be called an inexplicable transcendental contact.
It is the transcendental influence of puru@sa that sets in motion
the original prak@rti in Sa@mkhya metaphysics, and it is the same
transcendent touch (call it yogyata according to Vacaspati or
samyoga according to Bhik@su) of the transcendent entity of
puru@sa that transforms the non-intelligent states of buddhi into
consciousness. The Vijnanavadin Buddhist did not make any
distinction between the pure consciousness and its forms (_akara_)
and did not therefore agree that the akara of knowledge was
due to its copying the objects. Sa@mkhya was however a realist
who admitted the external world and regarded the forms as
all due to copying, all stamped as such upon a translucent substance
(_sattva_) which could assume the shape of the objects.
But Sa@mkhya was also transcendentalist in this, that it did not
think like Nyaya that the akara of knowledge was all that knowledge
had to show; it held that there was a transcendent element
which shone forth in knowledge and made it conscious. With
Nyaya there was no distincti