________________
CHAPTER XI
367
words: “We see the tendency to please everybody and to compromise and in trying to compromise it involves itself in self-contradiction; the saviour of all systems is committing suicide".! From this joint attack of Belvalkar and Rao emerges the third charge that syidvāda is contradictory to the Jaina philosophical position in general as well as that it is self-contradictory.
A systematically elaborate answer to each of these three charges, viz., eclecticism, agnosticism and contradiction including self-contradiction, lies, as already mentioned, outside the scope of this work. Moreover, if a glance is cast over the various chapters of this work, especially these last three parts, it will be seen that these criticisms have been met in spirit, if not in letter, according to the lights vouchsafed to the Jaina thinkers. We may, therefore, confine ourselves to a few remarks against each charge drawing upon, wherever possible, the remarks by the critics themselves who, on certain points, answer one another.
We may begin with the first criticism : Is syādvāda an eclecticism? Eclecticism is a "term applied to a system of philosophy or theology that strives to incorporate the truth of all systems, or the method by which it is made”. “Since an eclectic system is a loose piece of mosaic work, rather than an organised body of original thought", it is said, “the term in philosophy has come to be one of reproach”.?
1. "The Jaina Instrumental Theory of Knowledge" (Proceedings of
the First Indian Philosophical Congress, 1925, Calcutta University, Calcutta, 1927), p. 135. The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. by S. M. Jackson, New York and London, 1909, Vol. IV, p. 71.
2.
