Jaina Theories of Reality and Knowledge

SR No.: 001608
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Y J Padmarajiah
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal
Publication Year: 1963
Total Pages: 444
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, Epistemology, & Anekantvad
File Size: 23 MB

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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
Having gone, in considerable detail, into the way in which being and non-being, or identity and difference, have been integrated in concrete reality, we may now resume the treatment of the doșas which have been already formulated, elsewhere. The leading doşa is, as already observed, virodha or contradiction, and the other dosas are only the expression of its various aspects. The refutation of virodha implies,
found that where science has progressed the farthest the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature". Concluding this thesis he further remarks, “We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own." (Space, Time and Gravitation, Cambridge, 1920, pp. 200-201. See also the Reign of Relativity, p. 105, and Broad's elucidation and criticism of Eddington's thesis presented at the Symposium on "The Philosophical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity", Mind, N. S., 1920, pp. 414-49). Giving us a "glimpse of Reality” "reached” by "the modern scientific theories" which evidently include the theory under consideration, the same thinker speaks: "To put the matter crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.... The mind stuff is the aggregation of relations and relates which form the building material for the physical world”. (The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 266 ff.) A counterblast to this mentalism of some "experimental philosophers" like Eddington, and, at the moment, of H. Dingle, comes from an even larger number of equally competent "experimental philosophers" and others, the most notable among them being Max Born, A. N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, H. P. Ushenko and Henry Margenau. Reference is made elsewhere (see Part II, chap.IX), to the views, realistic or objectivistic, of the latter group of thinkers, excepting that of A. N. Whitehead since it has been referred to in this footnote. H. Dingle's view, as well as the criticisms thereon, may also be noticed thereunder. The relevance of some of the ideas considered in course of this footnote to the Jaina conception of reality will become even more evident at the later stages of this work.