IV. Kaivalya Pāda · Time and objects (4.12–4.17)
4.14 · The Real Stone
Because the transformation is one, a thing is a single reality.
Word by word
- pariṇāma-ekatvāt
- because the transformation is one
- vastu-tattvam
- the reality, the oneness, of a thing
Where it fits
Vyāsa asks how there can be one sound or one sense if all is guṇas. Because their transformation is one. He then turns on unnamed opponents who say there is no object apart from cognition, as in dreams; Vācaspati names them as Buddhist idealists. This opens the defence of real objects in 4.14–4.17.
Reading
If everything is made of three guṇas, how is there one stone or one sound? Because their transformation is one: many strands combine into a single real thing. This begins the first of three steps (4.14–4.17): objects are real and do not depend on the mind. Vyāsa turns on those who say there are no objects apart from cognitions, as in dreams, and asks how their own words could then be trusted. He does not name them; Vācaspati identifies them as Buddhist idealists (Vijñānavāda). For Yoga, the world is real.
Vyāsa
“Some deny that things exist in their own right, reasoning this way: 'There is no object apart from a cognition, but there are cognitions apart from objects, imagined, as in dreams and the like.' … How can their words be trusted while they explain away the very thing in front of them?”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya, the oldest commentary. New translation from the Sanskrit, with reference to Woods (1914), p. 319.
Practice
Pick up a stone, a cup or a piece of fruit. Hold it for two minutes with your eyes closed: weight, temperature, texture. Notice that it presses back. Whatever your mind adds to it, something is there.
A question to sit with
What is real here, before your story about it?
Where commentators disagree
Who are the idealists answered from 4.14 on, and does the sūtra text itself name them?
- Vyāsa
- Reports those who say there is no object apart from the act of knowing, and that things are imagined like the objects of dreams. When a thing presents itself by its own power, they throw it away by mere conceptual thinking; how can their words be believed? (Woods 1914, p. 319)
- Vācaspati Miśra
- As Dasgupta reports him, answers the Buddhist maxim that a blue thing and the knowledge of it are one because they are always perceived together: this rests on agreement alone and is not confirmed by difference. (Dasgupta 1924, pp. 32–33)
- J. H. Woods
- The sūtras very probably attack the Buddhist idealists in 3.14–3.15 and certainly in 4.14–4.21, most likely Vasubandhu's school. The sūtra names no school, but the Comment states the idealist's position and Vācaspati identifies him as a Vijñānavādin. Woods uses this to date the sūtras after the fourth century. (Woods 1914, pp. xvii–xviii)