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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
of expressing the concept of the inexpressible, cognate with the concept of anirvacaniyatā, or avyapadeśya, as the Jaina would call them.
Another important difference of this anirvacanīya view from that of the relativistic inexpressible of the Jaina, is that the former assumes sat and asat, singly or jointly, to be absolutely independent and contradictory while the latter assumes them to be relative and complementary. On the basis of this difference the former view is designated as nirapeksavāda and the latter sāpeksavāda. The attribution of absolute independence to sat and asat in their combination as sadasat paves the way for the development of the conception of the ultimate absolute (brahman) which utterly transcends words and eventually constitutes itself into the transcendental realm of truth (parasatya or paramārthasat). In other words, the verbal and logical transcendentalism becomes the metaphysical transcendentalism which relegates the antinomies of sat, asat and sadasat to the intrinsically unreal empirical realm.
The last phase in the dialectical evolution of the idea of the inexpressible is represented by the relativistic (säpeksa) view of syādvādin. The distinctive features of relativism and complementariness in the Jaina view of the inexpressible have already been brought out while contrasting them with the absolutistic view of the anirvacanīyavādin. Instead of fighting shy of their supposed contradictoriness and other difficulties the Jania treats the two elements of sat and asat, in their combination, as a necessary, inevitable and distinctive feature of our objective experience and, consequently, tries to assign them a place in the framework of his dialectical
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