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application of logic to experience. Samantabhadra, (2nd century A.D.) an ardent follower of Mahāvīra, argues that the conceptions of bondage and liberation, punya and pāpa (merits and demerits), heaven and hell, pleasure and pain and the like, lose all their relevance and significance if we exclusively recognize either permanence or momentariness, as constituting the nature of substance. The affirmation that the momentary disintegration of all things renders impossible such things as, financial transactions, memory, and the common-place relations of the husband and the wife, the teacher and the taught, and also indicates the subservience of ethical problems to the nature of being.
Mahāvīra differs from all absolutists in their approach to unfold the inner nature of reality. He weaves the fabric and structure of reality on the authority of indubitable experience and is not swayed in the least by the fascinations of a priori logic.? Mahāvīra evaluates what is given in experience, and consequently advocates change to be as much ontologically real as permanence. Both are separable, but only in logical thought. Being implies becoming and vice versa. Inconsistent as it may appear at the inception, there is no doubt that experience enforces it and logic confirms it. Mahāvīra adhered to the common experience and found no contradiction between permanence and change, both being free from all absolutism.
A thing has many characters and it exists independently. It is called substance (dravya). It persists in and through all attributes and modes. Substance is defined by Umasvati as gunaparyāyavad dravyan, that which possesses qualities and modes'. Out of these innumerable qualities of a substance, some
Āpta Mīmāṁsā of Samantabhadra, op.cit., verse-3.40. 2 K.C. Sogani. Ethical Doctrines in Jainism. Solapur: Jain Samskrta
Samraśak Samga, 2001, p. 14. *Tattvārtha Sūtra of Umāsvāti. English trans. Nathmal Tatia under the title
'That Which is' With the Combined Commentaries of Umāsvāti, Pūjyapāda and Siddasena Gani. America: Collins Publications, 1994, Sūtra-5. 37
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