Shankara’s cogito opens up simultaneously a new metaphysics and an
epistemology. The ground of consciousness is the highest metaphysical and
religious reality. Adopting the position that the effect preexists in the cause
(i.e., following Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti in opposing a plurality of causally
efficacious substances), Shankara holds that the Absolute is undifferentiated
from the world. We cannot say that the world holds any duality. But what
of the duality of the Absolute vis-à-vis the ordinary world of experience?
Shankara elaborates an epistemology of levels of truth. Nagarjuna, encounter-
ing the problem from the point of view of his omni-skepticism, had called his
own position a theory of no-theory. To put it another way, there is two-fold
truth: the worldly level on which arguments are made, and the level of ultimate
reality, which is inexpressible. Shankara elaborates this into three-fold levels:
the inexpressible Absolute, about which we can only say that it is non-dual;
the ordinary world, which is an illusion only from the standpoint of the
Absolute; and finally the level of perceptual errors (snakes which are really
ropes), as seen from the worldly standpoint.- From 800 c.e. through the 1500s: the post-Buddhist period of debates
among the victorious Hindu schools. This is the most neglected period of
Indian philosophy, with a reputation for religious sectarianism and anti-ra-
tional bhakti faith. The sectarian trend was real enough; during a time when
European networks were separating theology from philosophy and then un-
dergoing radical secularization, Indian philosophy was increasingly absorbed
into disputes on behalf of particularistic theological positions. After 1600 a
“lumpy syncretism” sets in, in opposition to Muslim conquerors and European
colonialists, amalgamating every position under the banner of a bhaktized
Advaita aconceptualism. Nevertheless, down through the 1300s at least, intel-
lectual competition among the schools remains sharp. Even when new theist
cults are established, they usually advertise their presence in the attention space
by disputing the metaphysical tenets of their established rivals. For a while the
shift toward sectarianism acts as a series of shocks to the external base,
stimulating philosophical creativity. If we take the pains to seek it out beneath
the theological trappings, we find in this period the mature phase of Indian
philosophy, its highest level of acuteness of the epistemology-metaphysics
sequence.
In the Advaita camp, Shri Harsha and Chitsukha took the offensive against
realists, mustering arguments paralleling Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. There can
be no knowledge of an object apart from the act of knowing it; to assume
independent reality lands one in the contradiction of knowing before one
knows. Substances are never perceived, but only qualities; yet how can qualities
act upon one another? There followed an argument made famous in the West
824 •^ Meta-reflections