Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion

A cognition is a psychological property distinct from the properties of a person's body and objects of sensory experience. A cognition rests or occurs in a self, and for only an instant before giving way to another cognition, each having as content, when veridical, intersubjective objects other than itself. But a cognition is also causally continuous with its objects—in the one direction, through the operation of the sense organs, sight, hearing, and so on, and, in the other, in having a causal role in action undertaken voluntarily. This paper sketches the Nyāya theory of perception with special attention to the arguments of the "New" or late Nyāya philosopher of the fourteenth century, Gangesa, in addressing two thorny areas of the Nyāya picture: (1) focus wanted and unwanted along with apparent cognitive simultaneity in a synthesis of sensory information deriving from the operation of more than one sense organ, and (2) the peculiar sensory connection involved in perception of future instances of universals, illusorty perception, and in recognition of someone or something that one has encountered before.

Classical or Patañjala Yoga diagnoses die human conditon as state of suffering caused by ignorance whose specific form is misidentification of self with psychophysical nature. This paper argues that liberation in Yoga is healing in an ultimate sense, i.e., attainment of well-being with respect to the person's fundamental nature and soteriological potential. Vyāsa's Yogabhasya presents the yogic remedy in terms of a medical model, and this paper excavates the therapeutic paradigm of the Yogasūtras using concept of health distilled from the Āyurvedic medical text Caraka-saṁhitā. Determinants of health according to Āyurveda include wholeness, self-identit), and freedom, and these concepts are utilized to ground the claim that in classical Yoga, liberation is healing: curing the dysfunction and consequent suffering of one's psychophysical self, which is coextensive with realization of one's true Self as consciousness.