Passage 5

Here this path, that one thing is itself to be dealt with as the absence of another thing, is, to begin with, a path of common experience that cannot be given up. There, the relation of what is held and what holds it, which one thing has with another, is the very relation between a thing and its absence. So the other real thing on the ground, apart from the pot, a stone or the like, or a heap of light or the like, which shines in a knowing by the eye, is itself what is dealt with as “the absence of a pot on the ground”, or as “there is no pot on the ground”. Even where the eye is not at work, when the eyes are shut, in thick darkness and the like, there too one grasps on the ground a touch set apart from the hard touch that befits a pot, soft, warm, cold, or neither warm nor cold, and deals with that very touch as “the absence of a pot here”; for the touch of the air, which goes everywhere, is bound to be there. This is the sense of the sentence. The sense word by word, though, is this. “Kiṃ tu” is the holding in awareness of a question put to his own insight, so as to bring in his own view: “What, then, is right here?” To that he says: “there”, on the ground, to begin with, a mass of light “is”, knowable; for the blind, a touch, warm or the like, “is” there. “Its own knowing”, the knowing of that mass of light or of that touch, that is, the knowing of it in its own form, set apart from another thing, a pot and the like: that is the doer. It “can establish”, there on the ground, that the light and the rest are not a pot in form, that is, have the form of the pot’s absence. This is the sense of “can”. The optative is by the rule “and the optative, where ‘can’ is meant”. And one who, from hearing the subtle sound born of the stirring of the inner prāṇa, takes the ear and the rest to be complete, hears that very sound as sharing a single act of knowing, and so denies any other sound: “there is no other sound here”. One whose ear attends to the subtlest inner nāda knows even the absence of that subtle sound. So too with the absence of taste, smell and touch: the absence of taste is to be known only by one who is aware of the taste of the water on the teeth, the smell of the tripuṭikā, and the touch of the body. For without perceiving another real thing fit to share a single act of knowing, there is no ascertaining that the causes of perception are complete. This is a rule without exception. If it is said, “The completeness of the causes is ascertained for the sense faculty, which is constructed from an experience of this or that content that went on a moment before, since no one suspects that it perished just then; so what need is there of sharing a single act of knowing?”, the answer is no. For one who wishes to perceive the true state of things is seen to do so only by setting to work, with effort, the seat of this or that sense.

But surely, on this account, the dealing in denial by separation would also extend to a piśāca and the like, which cannot be seen; for that heap of light, just as it is other than a pot, is likewise other than a piśāca and the like. With this very doubt in view, he says:

A piśāca, though it is not light, could be within the light, just as, unseen, it could be within the ground; it is not to be denied in every way.