Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals :Ch-4. Part - 16.

Chapter-4. Swami Sri  Adi  Sankaracharya - The Genius ( Sankara Jayanti ) :

 Part-16.

Now, this philosophy of uncritical acceptance of everything that is visible or everything that is sensible, to put it more generally, became the incentive behind the systems of thought called the Nyaya and the Vaiseshika, whose conclusion is that things are physical and psychological.

There is no other reality conceivable.

This conclusion is arrived at by a system of logic, argumentation, or a systematic, syllogistic process of argument.

Inasmuch as the followers of this system entirely depended on the syllogism of human thinking, logical argumentation, deducing things from given premises, the system is called the Nyaya.

'Nyaya' means logic.

It is, therefore, a logical system of pluralistic realism.

It is logical because it is syllogistic.

It is pluralistic because they accept the multiplicity of physical entities.

It is realism because the world, according to them, is external to the human mind and it is not a part of the process of human thinking.

What about God?

Is there a place for a Creator in this scheme of things?

Yes, this school of thought does accord a place.

But He is like a potter making a pot, a carpenter making a table, an engineer or a mechanic constructing a machine.

What does this imply?

The potter can make the pot, or not make it; and he can break the pot, if he likes.

The pot has nothing to do with the potter; it is completely outside him.

By a similar analogy, God was regarded as an extra-cosmic being, outside the cosmos.

The potter is outside the pot and cannot be inside the pot.

Likewise God cannot be in the world, and He is outside the world, because if He is in the world, how can He create it?

So the logical realism of the Nyaya and the Vaiseshika, which are brother systems, concluded that God is beyond the world and outside the world.

And a multiplicity of material was posited as the stuff out of which this extra-cosmic creator began to mould this cosmos, as a potter would shape a pot by manipulating the clay-material that is available to him outside.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ....