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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
part of his address to the Third International Congress for the History of Religions in 1908. To quote him in full : “All those who approach Jaina philosophy will be under the impression that it is a mass of philosophical tenets not upheld by one central idea, and they will wonder what could have given currency to what appears to us an unsystematical system. I myself have held, and given expression to this opinion', but I have now learned to look at Jaina philosophy in a different light. It has, I think, a metaphysical basis of its own, which secured it a position apart from the rival systems both of the Brahmanas and of the Buddhists”.' It is a pity that Jacobi did not give a fuller expression to his ideas after he "learned to look at Jaina philosophy in a different light”. Nevertheless he has suggested, in the address just referred to as well as in a few other brief writings, the lines on which he thought about the subject. Nor do any other writers seem to have approached the subject at any considerable length, on the dialectical lines of investigating the pervasiveness of one central idea in the different ramifications of the Jaina metaphysics. After making these general observations concerning the present study we may now proceed to consider the ontological position of anekāntavāda.
The most celebrated text the implications of which form almost the entire theoretical foundation of the Jaina philosophy
1.
In 1878, he wrote in his Introduction to the Kalpasūtra of Bhadrabahu (Leipzig, 1879), p. 3, that the philosophy of Mahāvīra "scarcely forms a system, but is merely a sum of opinions (pannattis) on various subjects, no fundamental ideas being there to uphold the mass of philosophical matter." SJJ, p. 48.
2.
