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not like to dispense with it for they think that it is impossible to have the knowledge of a thing as qualified by a predicate or a quality, without previously knowing the quality or the predicate (vis’i@s@tavais’i@styajnanam prati hi vis’e@sa@natavacchedakaprakara@m jnana@m kara@na@m) [Footnote ref 1].  So, before any determinate knowledge such as “I see a cow,” “this is a cow” or “a cow” can arise it must be preceded by an indeterminate stage presenting only the indeterminate, unrelated, predicative quality as nirvikalpa, unconnected with universality or any other relations (jatyadiyojanarahita@m vais’i@s@tyanavagahi ni@sprakarakam nirvikalpaka@m) [Footnote ref 2].  But this stage is never psychologically experienced (atindriya) and it is only a logical necessity arising out of their synthetic conception of a proposition as being the relationing of a predicate with a subject.  Thus Vis’vanatha says in his Siddhantamuktavali, “the cognition which does not involve relationing cannot be perceptual for the perception is of the form ’I know the jug’; here the knowledge is related to the self, the knower, the jug again is related to knowledge and the definite content of jugness is related to the jug.  It is this content which forms the predicative quality (vis’e@sa@natavacchedaka) of the predicate ‘jug’ which is related to knowledge.  We cannot therefore have the knowledge of the jug without having the knowledge of the predicative quality, the content [Footnote ref 3].”  But in order that the knowledge of the jug could be rendered possible, there must be a stage at which the universal or the pure predication should be known and this is the nirvikalpa stage, the admission of which though not testified by experience is after all logically indispensably necessary.  In the proposition “It is a cow,” the cow is an universal, and this must be intuited directly before it could be related to the particular with which it is associated.

But both the old and the new schools of Nyaya and Vais’e@sika admitted the validity of the savikalpa perception which the Buddhists denied.  Things are not of the nature of momentary particulars, but they are endowed with class-characters or universals and thus our knowledge of universals as revealed by the perception of objects is not erroneous and is directly produced by objects.  The Buddhists hold that the error of savikalpa perception consists in the attribution of jati (universal), gu@na (quality),

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[Footnote 1:  Tattvacintama@ni p. 812.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid. p. 809.]

[Footnote 3:  Siddhantamuktavali on Bha@sapariccheda karika, 58.]

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