Anekanta Philosophy of Co existence

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 66

The Axioms of Anekānta
51
The Concomitance of Existence and Non-existence The third axiom of non-absolutism is the concomitance of existence and non-existence. It is sometimes argued that because the surface of a wooden chair is hard, it bears weight and because it is soft, an axe can cut through it. And because hardness and softness contradict each other, they cannot coexist. But as they appear to co-exist, both of them are only appearance and not element. And along with their unelement the wooden chair is also unreal. This is not the way of nonabsolutism, which regards an infinite number of mutually opposed attributes as an inalienable part of a real. A real is an integrated whole of infinite number of attributes. It is exactly because those attributes are mutually opposed that a real is a real in the true sense of the term. Opposition, in fact, is the richness of the real and in the absence of such opposition of the real would be denuded of its element. It is indeed the intrinsic nature of a real to be possessed of such opposed attributes and if so why should an attempt be made to deny its element, by getting ourselves entangled in the labyrinth of imaginary contradictions. As Dharmakîrti puts it, who are we to deny what commends itself to the objects themselves? What should exercise our mind is the search for the source of those oppositions and the conditions of their syntheses. The philosophy of non-absolutism made such a search and found that existence and non-existence go together. Affirmation without negation and negation without affirmation is never