Central Philosophy of Jainism Anekanta Vada

Author(s): Bimal Krishna Matilal, Nagin J Shah, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 68

XV
IN DEFENCE OF THE JAINA POSITION
Of all the charges against the anekānta philosophy or the sevenfold syāt predication, the charge of contradiction or self-contradiction is certainly the most serious one. For a philosopher, to contradict himself is like writing or stating something and then cancelling it altogether. Do the Jainas really suffer from this offence ? Could the Jaina view be defended against the charge of self-contradiction or inconsistency ?
Let us focus our attention on the sevenfold predication. It is, however, clear from the interpretation of syāt particle given above that the first predication does not really contradict the second. The Jainas avoid contradiction by adding the syāt particle. The syāt operator turns the categorical proposition into a conditional, and thus the logical forms of the first two are:
(1) If p then a is F.
(2) If q then a is non-F. Or, more fully: (3) For all x, if x is considered from standpoint 1, x is eternal:
[(x) (FxGx)] (4) For all x, if x is considered from standpoint 2, x is not eternal:
[(x) (Hx ɔ -Gx )] It is clear that neither (1) and (2), nor (3) and (4) are, in any sense, contradictories. Thus, I think that when the Jainas say that from the standpoint of persisting substance, the person is eternal, but from the standpoint of modal changes (cf. paryāya ), the person is not eternal, they do not make any self-contradictory assertion.
How about the third and the fourth predications ? The third, to be sure, is the joint (but non-simultaneous ) assertion of the first and the second. But if the first and the second are not contradictories, then the third (which is only the truth-functional conjunction of the first and the second ) will not be self-contradictory. In other words, the third predication can be easily seen to be free from contradiction in this way. The fourth predication, however, presents a problem. For it seems to apply two incompatible predicates, eternal and non-cternal, to the subject