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DHARMAKİRTI'S ATTITUDE TOWARD OMNISCIENCE
Roger Jackson
In his autobiography, The Ochre Robe, Swami Agehananda Bharati describes an encounter with a college student on a bus in south India. The student tells Bharati :
'I wish I knew the Brahman like you or Swami Vivekananda or other sages, for then I would not have to study so hard for my exams ! It did not take me long to get at the root of this baffling reasoning. Here was a young victim of an age-old fallacy, for there is a term in the scriptures which literally means 'omniscient', sarvajña, and it is averred that a person who has intuited the absolute becomes a sarvajña, literally one who knows everything. But the trouble is that 'sarvajña' is a purely technical term used in Vedantic literature, and is synonymous wilh 'brahmajña', a "knower of Brahman', which again means one who has realized his oneness with the Absolute......1
Bharati's interpretation of omniscience may not meet with the approval of all Vedāntins, but there is no doubt whatever that in Jainism and in fully-developed Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism, the being who has attained all there is to be attained-be he a tithankara or a tathāgata-is held to be omniscient in the sense that he knows all there is to know of conventional and ultimate truth, of past, present and future, of the minds of other beings-in short, omniscient in precisely the sense ridiculed by Bharati when he goes on to ask his earnest interlocutor, “Do you then believe...that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa knew mathematics, atomic physics, English literature, and all that ?"2 The student answers this rhetorical question in the affirmative, and one assumes that a doctrinaire Jaina or Buddhist would, too.
While the majority of Jainas and Buddhists would affirm that the perfected beings in their respective traditions are omniscient in the most universal sense, there is room in both traditions for divergent interpretations. Prof. Ram Jee Singh points out that in the course of the development of Jaina thought, there are "the two important senses, namely, omniscience as knowledge of essentials and omniscience as universal knowledge, which ultimately survive and represent as two opposed views on the subject.""3 Present-day advocates of omniscience in the limited sense of knowledge of essentials seek “to establish the theory of omniscience on a scientific and logical basis which would be acceptable to the modern mind."4 Singh admits that "After going through the arguments presented by both of the opposing
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