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Lord Sumatinātha
illusion (māyā) and, therefore, beyond the reach of the intellect; and the Sankhya philosophy propounded by Kapila which posits only two permanent (nitya) realities, the spiritual principle of puruşa and the environmental existence of prakṛti, which account for the world processes by alternate enfolding and unfolding of attributes and functions. The puruşa is intelligent but inert, and prakṛti is all activity but blind. The union of the two accounts for the evolution of the samsara.
The Jaina conception of reality is different from the other darśanas which emphasize only a single aspect, either permanence or change, as the characteristic of reality. Vedantism may be taken to be an example of a philosophical system which emphasizes permanence as the characteristic of reality and dismisses change as mere illusion. Buddhism overemphasizes change through its concept of momentariness (kṣaṇikavāda), to the neglect of underlying permanence.
The systems which lay one-sided emphasis either on permanence or change are rejected by Jaina thinkers who describe such conceptions as ekāntavāda – clinging only to a singular aspect of reality. Such systems fail to acknowledge and appreciate the presence of other aspects of reality. Jaina thinkers rely on anekāntavāda, a system of philosophy which maintains that reality has multifarious aspects and that a complete comprehension of it must necessarily take into consideration all these aspects. Acārya Amṛtacandra's Puruṣārthasiddhyupāya has accorded an indispensable place to anekantavāda in Jaina scheme of things:
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