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It is the established doctrine of all systems 53 that bliss unmixed with any suffering is the highest goal of life. The commonly accepted view that there are four goals of life--namely, religious duty, the acquisition of wealth, pleasure, and final liberation 54--is to be taken figuratively. This is because, like the saying, "The plow is life," it suggests that things which are really only means are, in fact, ends.55 Therefore our thesis that bliss alone is the goal of life is not upset. According to the logicians of the Nyaya, there are two goals of life: bliss and the absence of suffering. 56 But this is not correct, because it is simpler to take bliss alone as the goal of life. The determining factor in a given cognition's giving rise to a desire to act upon it is its having pleasure as its object, not its having either pleasure or the absence of suffering as its object. This would involve unnecessary prolixity. 57 In fact, the absence of suffering is useful only at it is a pre-condition of bliss.58 The authors of the Nyaya treatises, however, might object to this, arguing as follows: "If it can be said that the absence of suffering is useful only insofar as it leads to bliss, it is equally possible to say, because of the lack of any deciding factor, 59 that bliss is useful only insofar

245 as it leads to the absence of suffering. Therefore both of 61 it is these are the goals of life." But this objection is not valid because there is a deciding factor, namely the relationship of invariable concomitance, 60 "Wherever there is bliss there is the absence of suffering. This is accepted by all as an invariable concomitance because it is seen to hold unconditionally. Thus, because every instance of bliss is invariably accompanied by the absence of suffering, which is the term of greater extension, proper to say that the absence of suffering is a precondition of bliss. But the reverse relationship, "Wherever there is the absence of suffering there is bliss," does not always hold true. It fails, for example, in deep sleep and cosmic dissolution. 62 Therefore, because the absence of suffering is not invariably accompanied by bliss, bliss is not its pre-condition. Since the presence of the term of greater extension can be otherwise accounted for as a precondition for the term of lesser extension, and as bliss is not the term of greater extension with respect to the absence of suffering, bliss, by itself, is the independent goal of life.63 It might now be objected that the admission that the absence of suffering is useful only in so far as it leads to bliss would mean that final liberation, which consists in the absence of suffering and is devoid of all bliss, would 64

246 If so, let us offer a funeral not be the goal of life. oblation for such a conception of final liberation, for we who follow the Vedanta declare that final liberation is the goal of life for the very reason that it is supreme bliss.65