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To clarify her conclusion, the meditator reasons that senses are not responsible for knowing and she gives the wax experience to prove it. The wax is first observed in all five qualities: taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight, and also by the shape and the size. The meditator observes that the fresh hard wax, which gives a cracking sound when hit with knuckles, has honey taste and scent.  However, as it is heated, she sees that hard wax liquefies giving a puddle with no sounds when hit, and is lost of its taste and scent (AT VII 30). From there she concludes that senses could not be responsible to let her still know that it is the same wax because she has just seen, right in front of her, the changeability and flexibility of the wax through the senses.

One may argue at this point that even though senses can change, they are still the main sources to provide necessary basic information about the bodies (wax in this case). This argument is understandable but not acceptable because apart from possibility of being deceived by an evil deceiver, even though senses perceive information of the bodies, they can only gather general partial information. For instance, senses can only show that wax changes in shape, color, smell but can’t judge that the wax before and after are the same. In the following passages, one will see that imagination is not capable of making this distinction either.

After showing the incapability of knowing by means of senses, the meditator moves to see if it is due to imagination. From the observation of the flexibility, the meditator asserts that the body (of the wax) had extended; the shape of wax transformed from being solid to liquid, and if it were to be heated longer, it could become larger space taking thing. Since the bodies are shapes that take space, and wax is an extendable body, the meditator categorizes wax as a space taking, transformable thing. However, even though it can be transformed into many shapes, the meditator is not able to imagine all the possible shapes because of the infinite amounts; the wax or its shapes can be imagined as triangular, flat, round, pyramidal, and many others or in between. Thus imagination could not have grasped the fact that it is the same wax, or in the case of searching for what “I” is, imagination would not be good enough to see all the possibilities of what it is in pure form.

By: Kaung

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