Anekantavada

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Atmanand Jain Sabha

Page 81

ant aspects which it successively puts on. These aspects, as is obvious, are changing without stop and elusive in some sense. This elusive character of all changes led Parmenides to hold that the changing aspects are but illusory and the being underlying them is the only reality. This abstract monism, denying the reality or all phenomenal changes is scarcely less rigorous in Spinoza whose speculation is found to lead to acosmigm. ultim. ately. The reality of the phenomena is similarly denied in the Maya-vada School of the Vedānta. The opposite view was propounded in ancient Greece by Haraclitus whose theory implied that phenomena changing ceaselessly and in quick succession were the only realities that we have and the hypothesis of a persistent substance underlying them is uncalled for. This was also the position, taken by the Buddhist Kśanika-Váda. So far as our experience is concerned, the doctriDes of the exclusive reality of the substance or of the modal changes appear to be equally abstract and are to yield to a theory of a concrete object having substance and modo as its two equally real aspects. The question thus recurs: How is the substance modified ? Leibnitz's ultimate reals were called 'monads.' These units of substance were endowed with an innate sponta