Doświadczenie poznania unicestwiającego w myśli adwajtystycznej

Abstract

The experience of annihilating cognition in the philosophy of Advaita: The well-known anecdote about Śaṅkara fleeing 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 avidyā is concerned. The article gives an account of two divergent opinions on such a hierarchy in advaita philosophy, each advocated by an eminent scholar - E. Deutch and P. Hacker. Unquestionably, the hierarchy concerns exclusively the superimposed reality. From the point of view of the vidyā all the levels of the phenomenal existence are no longer valid. The cognition of the ultimate reality is called ‘sublation’ by Deutch 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 existence and the illusory nature of the phenomenal world.