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Anekanta : Philosophy of co-existence
In these cases the rose (or water) is real from the point of view of the present mode, but it is not real from the point of view of past or future. Therefore, positive and negative statements are made by showing the relativity of the modes of past, present and future. A substance has two-fold powers: one is the power to hold its own self. This is the quality of agurulaghu, which is propounded through a positive statement. The other power is that of keeping one's existence independent of others so that an entity can exist separately, and does not lose its identity. This power is stated through a negative statement, the positive and negative statements are thus not imaginative; their usages are not redundant. A single positive statement cannot describe what it is and what it is not. The rose flower is different from that of dhatura is a case of empirical knowledge, needing no positive-cum-negative statement. But a positive-cumnegative statement is required to show why they are different. Both of them are essentially nothing but matter (or pudgalāstikāya). The molecules forming the rose are different from those of the dhatura flower. Therefore, the rose flower is keeping its entity separate from that of the dhatura. If the molecules of both the flowers had identical modes, rose would have been dhatura and dhatura would have been rose. Only the positive statement could not have propounded the
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