The Four Types of Defects

In the ninth section, Sri Jiva says: 

“Since people are prone to four types of defects, and something even more serious, that they are unable to grasp transcendental and inconceivable reality, their sensory perception and other similar tools will prove unreliable.”

 

Jiva Gosvami immediately gets to the point directly and without giving too many turns and reminds everyone that the conditioned soul is plagued by different kinds of defects that invariably cause very serious evaluation errors, so his knowledge must necessarily be imperfect. These four defects are: 

• bhrama, 
• pramada, 
• vipralipsa and 
• karanapatava.

 

Bhrama means making mistakes. Sri Vidyabhusana says that bhrama is when one believes that one is seeing something that does not really exist. In other words, the senses are imperfect. If we get lost in the desert, our desire to drink will project outward, making us see a mirage of fresh water that can never quench our thirst. Thus the senses make us see wonderful things that can never satisfy us, since they are mental projections devoid of substance.

Pramada means illusion or inadvertence: not being able to perceive something that exists. Just because we’ve never been to India doesn’t mean India doesn’t exist. This defect is caused by the limited capacity of our senses.

Vipralipsa is the tendency to deceive others and oneself, based on beliefs provoked by material motivations. 

Karanapatava is the inability to recognize a certain thing despite the commitment to analyze it.

 

Victim of these and other imperfections, man, especially the degenerate in Kali-yuga, has no possibility of finding the path that leads to the Truth. Then one must necessarily return to the words of the Supreme Personality of Godhead and those of the realized saints. These are contained in the Vedas and in the teachings of the living gurus, which contain precise and complete indications for transcending the tragic events of the world in which we live.

 

Therefore, let us reason, with the help of gurus, sastras and sadhus, about what are the proper tools to acquire knowledge. Different scriptures and different philosophers give different lists and quantities of pramana. Vedantists accept six; Jiva Gosvami, in Sarva-sanvadini, gives us a list of ten; Baladeva Vidyabhusana only mentions eight of them. 

However, everyone agrees that the main ones are three, the same ones that Srila Prabhupada often mentions in his writings and readings: pratyaksa-pramana, anumana-pramana and sabda-pramana.

 

The first, pratyaksa-pramana, is the knowledge that can be obtained from the perception of the senses and of which we have already spoken; simply put, a thing is true to the extent that we can perceive it with our senses. This text has its usefulness but, due to the limitation and imperfection of the senses themselves, the sages do not give it great importance.

 

The second, anumana-pramana, is the knowledge that can be obtained from the action of our intelligence, that is, by deduction. This also has its usefulness, but it is limited. Our intelligence has the same defects as the senses, because our intellect is constituted fundamentally by the result of the elaboration of sensory experiences.

 

The third, sabda-pramana, also called aitiya-pramana, is knowledge of the scriptures or realized saints: in other words, information of divine origin. All the Vedic sages accept this sabda-pramana as the final and perfect test, and the other pramanas also find their perfection in the context of sabda-pramana. This does not mean that the senses or intelligence should be set aside, but that they are subordinate to the force of divine witness.

 

Therefore, in this work you will find a number of discussions that are based on the authority of the perfect scriptures, such as the Vedas, Upanisads, Puranas, etc. The Tattva-sandarbha is a philosophical text based mainly on sabda-pramana.

This is a section of the book “Tattva Sandarbha”, in English.

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