Budhdhi Jnanam

‘Budhdhi, Jnanam ledu’ is a sentence we often listen from people in telugu.  I often used to wonder as a kid what budhdhi and jnanam meant.  An understanding of their meaning from the Nyaya and Vaiseshika schools of philosophy is given below.

Knowledge(Jnanamu) is a representation of reality and could be true or false.  The acquisition of this knowledge involves three elements in a human being.  Firstly the self, defined as an all pervading consciousness i.e. a ‘spruha’ which is present in each and every particle in our body.  Secondly the mind , which is like a mediator between the self and the senses, and thirdly the sensory organs(sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste).

Cognition is a property of the self and it makes things understood.  We can say that cognition is like a vehicle which captures reality as best as it can and brings the catch to the mind.  The mind then processes the captured reality and conveys it to the self.

There are three elements in the process of cognition- object of cognition, the process of cognition and the cognizing self.  Let me illustrate with an example.  When we see a chair , we say ‘this is a chair’. Here there is an object of cognition viz., the chair, the process of cognition which is performed by our eye, and the cognizing self i.e. Myself. When I   say ‘this is a chair’, what it really means is ‘I know that this is a chair’.  This implies that ‘I’ i.e. the myself or self has passed a judgment(budhdhi).  

Let us examine what this judgment means.  Every human being has two worlds.  One is the world of reality (I am not sure if I can call it so) as we experience, and the other a world of ideas (uha prapancham).  There are innumerable ideas already formed and floating in the world of ideas: idea of a tree, idea of beauty, idea of courage, idea of a chair, idea of jealousy etc.  In this example, the image brought to the mind by our optical nerves took part in one such ideas viz., the idea of a chair.  As soon as this image partook of the idea of a chair the mind passed a judgement that it’s a chair.

When our cognition captures an image of reality and brings it to our mind, the mind processes it and arrives at a judgment.  In each judgment we express there is an object of knowledge (chair) which in reality possesses certain attributes.  If the judgement has to be true these attributes have to be represented as in reality by the judgement.

Every time the vehicle of cognition brings some reality it captures, there could be some error.   It is however assumed that cognition carries with it self-evidence. If cognition is bringing an image of a chair, it is assumed that the proof is also brought along with it.  Whatever is brought home by cognition can be proved wrong only in two cases.

1)     Discovery by other means the real nature of the object(microscopes, telescopes, mathematical models etc.)

2)     Discovery of defects in the instruments of cognition(hearing impairment, defects in vision, etc.).

Therefore budhdhi as I understand is the judge who sits in each of us and keeps passing judgments without we even realizing.  So can we call the compilation of all these judgments in our life as the knowledge we possess?