Mithyatva

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Mithyatva means 'falsity of the world'. Disappearance (nivrtti) is the necessary presupposition of mithyatva because what is falsely perceived ceases to exist with the dawn of right knowledge. But, mithya or 'falsity', or mithyatva or 'falsity of the world', cannot be easily defined as 'indefinable', 'non-existent', 'something other than real', 'which cannot be proved, produced by avidya or as its effect', or as 'the nature of being perceived in the same locus along with its own absolute non-existence'.^[1]

Ignorance is avidya for the Buddhists, aviveka for the Samkhyas and mithyatva for the Jains.

Buddhism

The Madhyamikas contend that the final release or nirvana is possible only through Sunyata. Sunyata involves giving up all views, stand-points and predicaments. Sunya means 'unreal' or 'nothingness'. Nagarjuna categorically negates all positions, and he states that a position (paksa) begets a counter-position (pratipaksa), controversy and conflicts in views (whether affirmative or negative), both are unavoidable. Negation, the despair of thought, at once opens the path of intuition for it is the threshold of intellectual intuition. Sunyata removes all restrictions put on reality; and is the negation of negations; there are twenty modes of Sunyata. Sunyata has a spiritual goal and is not 'positivism'. The Positivists deny the significance of metaphysics, for them the sense-given suffices it being real, but the Madhyamikas reject speculative metaphysics, not because there is no real that is transcendent but because by its defective procedure dogmatic metaphysics one wrongly understands the transcendent in terms of the empirical modes.^[2] The Yogacara teaching is situated within the Buddhist framework of causal operations but cannot explain how the error of an unreal subject-object dichotomy, leading to the perception of an external world, can actually arise in the non-dual flow consciousness without an object.^[3] According to 'Abhidharmakosa', 'mithyatva' means rebirth in the hells or as an animal or as a preta.^[4] Ratnagotravibhagha terms mithyatva as the state of evil.^[5]

Jainism

According to Jainism there are seven types of beliefs - mithyatva, sasvadana-samyaktva, mishra-mithyatva, kashopashmika-samyaktva, aupshamika-samyaktva, vedak-samyaktva and kshayik-samyaktva; mithyatva, meaning false or wrong belief, is the soul’s original and beginning less state of deluded world-view, at which stage the soul is in a spiritual slumber, unaware of its own bondage.^[6] Mithyatva or 'delusion' are of five kinds – Ekanta (when one harbours false belief without knowing it to be false), Viparita (when one thinks that this or that may be true), Vinaya (when a belief is retained even when it is known to be false), Samsaya (when there is doubt whether a course is right or wrong) and Ajnana (when one does not harbour any belief whatsoever).^[7] There are 28 kinds of mohaniya (deluding) karmas that prevent the true perception of reality and the purity of the soul, the darsana mohaniya karman which function to prevent a soul’s insight into its own nature and therefore, deemed destructive, are mithyatva karman. The term, mithyatva, meaning 'perversity', is generally used to denote the idea of avidya alongwith mithyadarsana or mithyadrsti (wrong view), darsanamoha (delusion of vision), moha (delusion) etc;. The state of mithyatva is manifested as a fundamental tendency to see things other than as they really are (Tattva Sutra 8:9).^[8] Passions such as Aversion (dvesa) and Attachment (raga), which are also called pursuers from the limitless past (anantanubandhi), operate in conjunction with mithyatva.^[9] Mithyatva is the one-sided or perverted world-view which generates new layers of karma and leads logically towards extremism; it is at the root of human arrogance.^[10]

Advaita Vedanta

Ignorance begets avivek (opposite to wisdom). One engages in deeds, good and bad, due to avivek, earns punya or becomes a victim of sin and is re-born.^[11] Avivek also means lack of reason or imprudence or indiscretion. Avidya and avivek give dukha i.e. suffering and pain.

Madhusudanah in his Advaita-siddhi gives five definitions of mithyatva which term is derived from mithya meaning false or indeterminable. False is something that appears and is later negated or contradicted; the unreal is never an object of experience, the concept of unreal is self-contradictory. Falsity is defined as – not being the locus of either reality or unreality, it is distinct from both reality and unreality. In practice, mithyatva has three means, – a) that which does not exist in three divisions of time, past, present and future; b) that which is removable by knowledge; and c) that which is identical with the object of sublation. Whereas mithya is other than real but not real, mithyatva is identical with sublatability.^[12] Mithyatva may also be understood as that which is negated even where it is found to exist. The followers of the Advaita School contend that the world-appearance is negated by Brahman-knowledge and hence it is illusory. To the followers of Vishishtadvaitavada, mithya is the apprehension of an object as different from its own nature.^[13]

The Advaita School considers Mithyatva to mean falsity of the world. Disappearance (nivrtti) is the necessary presupposition of mithyatva because what is falsely perceived ceases to exist with the dawn of right knowledge. But, mithya or falsity, or mithyatva or falsity of the world, cannot be easily defined as indefinable or non-existent or something other than real or which cannot be proved or produced by avidya (or as its effect) or as the nature of being perceived in the same locus along with its own absolute non-existence. The opponents of the Advaita do not accept the contention that Atman is simply consciousness and cannot be the substratum of knowledge, and they insist that existence as the logical concomitant of the absence of non-existence and vice versa, with these two being mutually exclusive predicates, must be admitted. The opposite of unreality must be reality.^[14]

Perception, that cognizes the object and the difference between real and unreal, is not a cause for the comprehension of an object. Perception does not comprehend both the object and the difference simultaneously because the perception of difference is produced by the perception of the correlative and the counter-correlative. Non-existence cannot be a means to the knowledge of difference, there is as such no reciprocal dependence between non-existence and difference. Even the Scriptural cognition of difference is a product of nescience like the empirical knowledge derived from perception and inference, but the object of Scriptual knowledge is unsublatable because it is absolute.^[15]

According to Advaita anything which is both cognized and sublated is mithya. Mithyatva is negated even where it is found. The illusoriness of the world is itself illusory. Once Brahman-knowledge arises both the cognizer and the cognized disappear.^[16]

The proof of unreality is impermanence, the permanent one is the Sole Reality. Mithyatva is apparent reality; at the level of ultimate truth, when, through the understanding of the mithyatva of all limiting adjuncts (upadhis) of name and form i.e, those that pertain to the individual body-mind (tvam) and as well to the lordship of Brahman (tat), everything is seen to be not an other to pure Awareness, the distinctions of Jiva and Ishvara no longer apply, and it is the param Brahman, the very essential of the Lord Itself, that is the final reality. In Advaita the method to reveal the unreality (mithyatva) of things involves the idea of change and permanence i.e. what deviates and what persists.^[17]

Mithyatva means 'illusoriness'. Advaita maintains that Brahman alone is real, the plurality of the universe is because the universe is illusory, the universe can be cognized; whatever that is cognized is illusory. The universe is different from the real as well as the real, the universe is indeterminable. Vedanta Desika refutes this contention because there is no such entity which is neither real nor unreal. The universe which is different from Brahman is inseparably related to Brahman.^[18] Badarayana (Brahma Sutra III.ii.28) declares that between the Jiva and Brahman there is difference as well as non-difference like the relation of light to its substratum or source on account of both being luminous, one being limited and the other all-pervading, the all-pervading is real and immortal. Rishi Damano Yamayana (Rig Veda X.xvi.4) insists that all should know about that part of the body which is immortal; the immortal part of the body is the Atman or Brahman, it is called a part because without it there cannot be life in one’s body.^[19] Vacaspati of the Bhamati school states that whereas illusion conceals, mithyatva signifies 'concealment', the real nature of the cognized object is concealed resulting in non-apprehension of difference between the real and the unreal objects. Padmapada of the Vivarna school adds to the sense of concealment the sense of inexpressibility, thus hinting at the sublatability of illusion.^[20] If the term anirvacaniya is defined by the Advaita as the nature of being different from sat and asat in essence, which is the nature of mithyatva, then the element of difference must be real. Even though Jayatirtha states that there is no bar on the validity of the experience of difference, but the fact remains that difference cannot be an attribute of objects. Madhavacharya concludes that difference is not something that falls outside the content of an object or what is generally considered to constitute its essence which in perception is the sum total of its distinction from others. The perception of an object is the same as the perception of its difference from all others.^[21]

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