Doświadczenie poznania unicestwiającego w myśli adwaitystycznej
The Experience of Annihilating Cognition in the Philosophy of Advaita Vedanta

Summary/Abstract: The well-known anecdote about Śankara fleeting from a charging bull indicates the existence of some kind of reality and inherent logic in the empirical world. It also implies a hierarchy of reality as far as the existence rooted in avidya is concerned. The article gives an account of two divergent opinions on such a hierarchy in advaita philosophy, each advocated by an eminent scholar - Eliot Deutsch and Paul Kacker. Unquestionably, the hierarchy concerns exclusively the superimposed reality. From the point of view of the vidya all the levels of the phenomenal existence are no longer valid. The cognition of the ultimate reality is called 'sublation' by Deutsch and 'contradiction' by Hacker. The present article includes a suggestion of a new, presumably more adequate term - 'the annihilating cognition', since the cognition of the ultimate reality inevitably involves the certainty of the non exictence and the illusory nature of the phenomenal world.

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