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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
Rāmānuja's objections against the bhedābheda philosophy, however, serve, in a somewhat indirect manner, as an indication of his attitude towards the Jaina view of reality. A direct statement of this attitude, touching in particular the point of self-contradiction in Jainism, is made in the course of his comments on the well-known sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa : “Not so, on account of the impossibility in one". Commenting, Rāmānuja observes : “Difference (bhinnatvam)... consists in things being the abodes of contradictory attributes; non-difference, not any more than the generic character of a horse and that of a buffalo, can belong to one animal.” Concluding his comments, Rāmānuja reiterates, “Things which stand to each other in the relation of mutual non-existence cannot after all be identical.” 3
Deferring a treatment of the Jaina solution to the above objection of self-contradictoriness urged not merely by Viśiştādvaitism but also by the other Vedantic, as well as the Buddhistic, schools, a few critical observations may be made here on the implications of Rāmānuja's own theory of reality.
All the efforts of Rāmānuja to weave difference as an independent entity into the texture of a brahman-ridden reality have proved unsuccessful and resulted in what is, after all, a "temperate monism", as Max Müller calls it. No system which is dominated by an infinite absolute-an absolute which is the source and explanation of all that is finite, or
1. Vedāntasutras, p. 516. 2. Ibid., p. 518. 3. Ibid., p. 518. 4. See infra, Ch. V.
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