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JAINA THEORIES OF REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE
is mentalistic or epistemic (prātītikasattvam). Nothing else than it is real. This pan-psychic reality cannot, in the nature of the case, admit of objectivity or an independent non-mental principle. Hence the question of distinction cannot arise in it. If it does, we have to find something which is to be distinguished from the absolute. There is nothing answering such a description. It is not possible to speak of a distinction in a real where there is no possibility of an actual separableness in some genuine sense. This is the story of all idealism, viz., that the real therein stages its duel with itself, or, at best, its shadow; it enacts a play in which the dramatis personae consist of one character only; or it constitutes a musical scale which consists of one note onlynamely, itself. Not merely this, it is also the duel as well as the participant in it; the play as well as the player; and the music as well as the musician. Hegel at least tries to integrate difference in the ascending order of his triadic dialectic but, eventually, with the same result as his Indian counterpart.
It may, however, be argued that Śankara does recognise
1.
Prātītikasattvam sarvasyeti siddham/ p. 537, Advaitasiddhi of Madhusudanasarasvati (with three commentaries, ed. N. S. Ananta Krishna Sastri, Bombay, 1917). avidyāyonayo bhāvāḥ sarve'mi budbudā iva / kşaņamudbhūya gacchanti jñānaikajaladhau layam // Ibid. (quoted by the author from Śruti). etat sarvam mana eva (quoted in Gaudabrahmanandi, a com. on the above work Ibid., p. 537). jagato manaħpariņamatvamuktam / Ibid. Lastly, asmādātmanaḥ sarve prāņāḥ sarve lokāḥ sarve vedän sarvāṇi bhutani / (quoted by Nyāyāmộtakāra) Ibid., p. 538.
2. See the above f.n., particularly the second quotation.
