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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
and realistic philosophy of difference and incline it towards some kind of idealism. As it stands this system is, as already pointed out, one in which "diversity (or difference) and not unity (or identity) is at the root of the universe". In other words this system subordinates identity to difference.
B. Madhva's Dvaitism
An even greater' stress than in the Vaiseṣika system is laid on viseșa, the principle of difference, in Dvaitism which is built up on the two ultimate postulates", the Independent (svatantra) and the Dependent (paratantra or asvatantra), the former postulate representing the supreme God and the latter comprising the selves, the material world and nonexistence.*
1.
66
OIP, p. 225. (The words within brackets are mine.) 2. In the first place, although distinctions in the Vaiśeşika system, even among the composite bodies, are ultimately derived from viseṣas, visesas are restricted to the simple or ultimate substances only (see above under the Vaiśeşika system, p. 109, f.n. 6). In Dvaitism, however, visesas are postulated not only in the case of (ultimate or eternal) substances but in that of all categories even non-existence. Secondly, while in the Nyaya-Vaiśeşika (or the Vaiseşika) višeşa accounts for the difference which is assumed to exist between two things, here (in Dvaitism) it accounts for making difference where there is none". See EIP, p. 194 f. Considerations like how viseșa is of comprehensive and great importance and how it lends significance to identity will become clear in the course of the present section.
3.
4.
See SDAC, p. 87 and RRS, p. 168.
The selves, and the material world, called cetana principle and the acetana principle, respectively, are together treated as
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