Applied Philosophy of Anekanta

Author(s): Shashiprajna Samni
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati Institute

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view, none could claim that they had understood all aspects of a given issue.
Jainism, on the other hand, does not propose the primacy of identity or difference, permanence or change; rather, it advocates that only a synthesis or identity and difference, permanence and change, will lead to a balanced view. This comprehensive theory is a combination of existence of reality that is very complex and its limitless manifoldness. This conception of the union of the 'permanent' and 'change' takes us to the central doctrine of Jainism, the theory of relative pluralism, as against the absolutism of the Vedic-Upanishadic view or the total flux of the Buddhists. Jain philosophy can be called the philosophy of Co-ordinating Identity with Difference.
Anekānta emphatically states that nothing can be affirmed absolutely as all affirmations are true under certain circumstances, conditions, and limitations. Anekāntavada says: All affirmations are true only in a limited sense and all things possess an infinite number of qualities and each of which can be affirmed only in a particular sense. If this is true of physical objects like a pot or an ornament, one can easily imagine the state of abstract concepts, symbolic systems like language, meanings, etc.
In recent years, the theory of relativity of Albert Einstein, a highly complex scientific theory, has been compared with the philosophical theory of relativity in Jainism. Both theories state that an object is not what it appears to be from one point of view and that the other points are not distortions or deviations. Albert Einstein himself remarked, "We can only know the relative truth, the real truth is known only to the universal observer' (Cosmology Old and New, p. 13). In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest exponents of the theory of relativity, an object is a 'symposium of worlds presented to different view points' (Eddington 1935). He further
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