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from the principles of any other system. It is thus a unique doctrine of the Jaina philosophy and it is its original contribution to the course of the world-thought. Reality is never absolute, self-centred or abstract but is always many-sided in accordance with the plurality of its relationships to the manifold other reals. It is one and many, eternal and evanescent, general and particular, immutable and changing, real and phenomenal and so on,-always the abode of apparently opposite features all harmonised into a concrete wbola. This is the essence of the Syad-vada and this Syād-vāda is the soul of the Jaina philosophy. The attitude of the Syād-váda towards the other systems of Philosophy is what befits its above nature. An object is Anekanta or possessed of many aspects, each of which expresses only a partial aspect of the object. None of the seven predications of the Anekantavåda is thus either absolutely correot or abso. lutely wrong. Each is correct in its own way and each is wrong as every partial view of an object is wrong. The Jainas do not contend that the theories of the other systems of Philosophy are wholly wrong. They hold that each of those theories has admittedly a rational basis and is acceptable to some extent. The Jaina
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