OBJECT, KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION
Dialogue 17A: I think we should go into the question of the perception of beauty. You said
the other day that the tradition had ignored the field of beauty. We need to
explore this.
K: So, what is the question? What is the perception of beauty? Do you mean
perception and then beauty? Surely it is not perception and beauty, but
perception. What would be the traditional approach to this?
R: One source of tradition maintains that beauty is the sense of happiness which
comes when there is the ending of the desire or the thirst for experience.
K: Is this a theory or a reality?
R: The writer expressed what he felt; after all, he wrote a long time ago and only
fragments of his writings remain.
A: Kālidāsa says that the experience of beauty is new every moment.
R: Both in India and Greece there was this feeling that ultimate perceptions are
perceptions of beauty, truth and goodness.
K: Are we discussing beauty or perception? We will start with perception. What
is the traditional approach to perception?
R: They talk about it at length, and there are many contradictory viewpoints.
A: Perception is pratyakṣam—seeing the self-nature of things, their essential
quality.
K: Seeing the essence of something is perception, is that it? I am not talking of
what you see, but of the act of seeing. Do they talk about the act of seeing and
not of what is seen?
R: They speak about valid knowledge and about knowledge which is not valid.
K: Seeing is one thing and seeing something is another. Which is it that they are
talking about—seeing per se or seeing something?
A: I think it is seeing. They are concerned with the constant danger of seeing
wrongly.