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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE. 4. Syâdavaktavya (the thing is indescribable in a certain sense);
5. Syâdasti avaktavya (somehow the thing is and is indescribable);
6. Syânnâsti avaktavya (somehow the thing is not and is indescribable); and
7. Syâdasti nâsti avaktavya, (a thing may be existent from one point of view, non-existent from another, and yet be indescribable froin a third).
This exhausts the whole range of predication, and shows the limits within which seeming contradictions not necessarily so.
We may now revert from this somewhat lengthy but necessary digression, and take up the three subjects, namely, God, Nature and souls, with reference to which we proposed to study the differences amongst the principal religions of the world.
Of these the idea of
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God
which, as we saw in the third chapter, has been understood in a variety of senses by mankind, is the first to claim our attention. The true idea of God is naturally that of Jainism, which signifies the Supreme Status of the Liberated Soul. The hypothesis of absorption in God as the summum bonum of life cannot itself mean anything short of this that the Emancipated Souls all enter the being of God, not to be destroyed in the process of absorption, but to co-exist with one another, in an interpenetrating manner. Here, also, the idea of God is only that of the Liberated Souls which have a common status and Essence.
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