PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

292 NONMONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONS

having arisen in him he at once sets to work to accomplish it.

If, on the other hand, he were to realize that the effect of such

activity would be the loss of personal existence, he surely

would turn away as soon as somebody began to tell him about

“release”... Nor must you maintain against this that even in

the state of release there persists pure consciousness;... No

sensible person exerts himself under the influence of the idea

that after he himself has perished there will remain some en-

tity termed “pure light”! – What constitutes the “inward” self

thus is the “I,” the knowing subject.^29

A similar theme is expressed in this passage:

“May I, freeing myself from all pain, enter on free possession

of endless delight?” This is the thought which prompts the

man desirous of release to apply himself to the study of the sa-

cred texts. Were it a settled matter that release consists in the

annihilation of the “I,” the man would move away as soon as

release were only hinted at. “When I myself have perished,

there persists some consciousness different from me,” to bring

this about nobody truly will exert himself.^30

The “permanence” referred to here, like that of the Jain and unlike that of
the Cartesian doctrine, is everlasting; like the Cartesian doctrine, and
unlike the Jain, Ramanuja holds the permanence to be possessed only by
divine courtesy and dependent on divine grace. In addition to an
insistence on the distinctness, endurance, and value of the individual
person or self, Ramanuja refers us to the nature of conscious experience
as a basis for the view that a person is a mental substance in yet another
passage:

Some things – e.g., staffs and bracelets – appear sometimes as

having a separate, independent existence of their own; at other

times they present themselves as distinguishing attributes of

other things or beings (i.e., of the persons carrying staffs or

wearing bracelets). Other entities – e.g., the generic character

of cows – have a being only insofar as they constitute the form

of substances, and thus always present themselves as distin-

guishing attributes of those substances... The assertion,

therefore, that the difference of things is refuted by immediate

consciousness is based on the plain denial of a certain form of

consciousness, the one namely – admitted by every one – which

is expressed by the judgment “This thing is such and such.”^31