All human ends are reached after true knowledge. Therefore, in this work, true knowledge is being expounded.
True knowledge is of two kinds: perception and inference.
Of these, perception is the knowledge that is free from imagination and is unerring.
It is free from imagination, which is the appearance of an object that is capable of being related to a name.
It is [also] such cognition that does not contain error that is due to such causes as darkness,1 quick movement,2 moving on a boat [on a river]3 and aggravation of biles and cough4 etc.
Perception [so defined] is of four kinds:
(1) Cognition by means of the senses.
(2) Mental cognition [which] follows sense-cognition which is its immediate homogenous cause, in cooperation with the object, which immediately follows the object of sense-cognition.5
(3) Self-cognition6 is manifestation of every consciousness and every mental phenomena to itself.
(4) The cognition of the Yogin,7 which arises from repeated thinking of the reality, when such thinking reaches a perfection that cannot be exceeded.
Its object is the particular having its own unique nature.8 This object, with its own unique nature, is that whose nearness or not-nearness gives rise to differences in the manifestation of cognition.9 That is ultimately real, for it alone gives rise to the power of causal efficacy of things.10
What is other than it is universal object,11 which is the object of inferential cognition.
Perceptual cognition is the result of pramāṇa,12 being of the nature of cognition of the object.
Pramāṇa consists in a cognition’s similarity to the object.13
Because of it, cognition of object is possible.
1. Darkness makes one mistake a rope for a snake.
2. Quick circular motion of a stick on fire looks like a circular band of fire.
3. Being on a moving boat, one perceives things on the bank as if they are moving.
4. These aggravations of the bodily chemicals make one’s eyes jaundiced so that one sees all things as yellow.
5. The Buddhist view is that mental cognition follows the sense-cognition of an object.
6. On the Buddhist view, every mental state is self-manifesting, it apprehends itself.
7. The yogis know a thing as a result of repeated thinking about it.
8. Here “its object” is the object of perception. The object of perception is the pure particular, the unique particular (not instantiating any universal).
9. This is a definition of the unique particular.
10. The Buddhist here defines the real as what is capable of being causally efficacious.
11. Contrasted with the unique particular is the universal object.
12. Perception as a means of knowing produces perception as a true cognition.
13. Here “pramāṇa” means “truth.” Truth is “similarity” between cognition and its object.
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From Nyāyabindu, chapter 1. Translated by J.N. Mohanty.