Comparative Study Of Jaina Theories Of Reality And Knowledge

SR No.: 022768
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Y J Padmarajaiah
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal
Publication Year: 1963
Total Pages: 446
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 35 MB

Page 275

CHAPTER VIII
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universe and microscosmically, the paryāyas) or 'the Other'. would be untraceably 'absorbed'.'
These two major divergences-not to speak of the other cognate ones concerning, for instance, unity and plurality, or the non-occurrence or the otherwise of the compresence' of the universal and particular in a real-militate against a wholesale comparison being made—except with reference to the earlier phase of Hegelianism, and, within the limits to which a reference has been made earlier-between the absolutistic idea of the concrete universal and the Jaina notion of a real. But the authors of An Epitome of Jainism seem to ignore these divergences, and, to reduce Jainism to an imperfect copy of the Hegelianism in respect of the problem in question. In their attempt at comparison of the two schools they write, for instance, that "everything which is real is rational”, and add, as if by way of elucidating this truth: “The thinker and the object thought of are nothing apart from each other. They are twain and yet
1. "The Other, which it asserts, is found on enquiry, to be really
no Other.... And the form of otherness or of opposition again has no sense, save as an internal aspect of that which it endeavours to oppose." AR (9th imp., 1930), p. 463. “.... Mind on its part is not merely a world beyond Nature and nothing more: it is really, and with full proof, seen to be mind, only when it involves Nature as absorbed in itself." The Logic of Hegel, p. 180. (Italics mine.) Bradley confirms this truth: "Nature is an abstraction from experience, and in experience it is not co-ordinate with spirit or mind. For mind, we have seen, has a reality higher than Nature, and the essence of the physical world already implies that in which it is absorbed and transcended. Nature by itself is but an indefensible division in the whole experience." AR (9th imp., 1930), p. 470.