Theories of Perception

There are four schools of Buddhists. The Vaibhāṣikas hold that the external world is an object of perception. They maintain the independent existence of nature and mind; the nature is extramental and is immediately perceived by the mind. The Sautrāntikas also hold that the external world exists. But according to them, it is not an object of direct perception. The external objects produce presentations in the mind through which we infer the existence of external objects. From the epistemological point of view, both the Vaibhāṣikas and the Sautrāntikas are realists; but the former are advocates of nāïve realism, while the latter are hypothetical dualists or cosmothetic idealists, to use the expression of Hamilton. The Yogācāras do not believe in the existence of extra-mental objects. According to them, the immediate objects of our consciousness are the ideas of the mind; these ideas can never carry us beyond themselves to extra-mental objects. Thus the Yogācāras are subjective idealists. The Mādhyamikas annul the existence of mind and matter, subject and object, and go beyond them to the void (sūnya) which is beyond the scope of intellectual knowledge. Thus the Mādhyamikas are nihilists. But here we are not concerned with the epistemological theories of perception. We shall deal here only with the psychological analysis of perception given by the Buddhists. The only Buddhist work in which we find a psychological analysis of perception is Nyāyabindu of Dharmakīrti with its commentaries, Nyāyabinduṭīkā and Nyāyabinduṭīkāṭippanī. Here the subject has been treated probably from the Sautrāntika point of view. ¹