Perception (Pratyakṣa)

Pratyakṣa is direct perception — the knowledge that arises when a sense meets its object, the eye seeing color or the ear hearing sound. Every Indian school accepts it as the first and most immediate means of valid knowledge, the bedrock on which the others build. But agreeing that we perceive did not end the debate; it began it. How sense-contact yields knowledge, whether perception is ever free of conceptual construction, and whether yogic perception can reach what the ordinary senses cannot, became central and hard-fought questions across the darśanas and in the long argument with the Buddhist epistemologists.