Concept of Paryaya in Jain Philosophy

Author(s): S R Bhatt, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 58

46 Concept of Paryaya in Jain Philosophy That which whilst it does not forsake its innate nature, is connected with origination, annihilation, and stability and which possesses qualities and modifications they call a substance. Existence is the innate nature of a substance, (connected as this is) with qualities and various modifications of its own, with origination, annihilation and stability at all times. 14 Now the question arises how does change take place or what makes the change possible ? A thing can be changed only in one or other of the two ways. Either the change is effected by some external agency or it is self-originated, springing up, as it were, spontaneously within the thing. 15 There are misconceptions in regard to each of these two ways. If substance is all that there is, as the Greek Philosopher Parmenides pointed out, it cannot be changed by some external agency, since there can be no such agency. While external agency by itself cannot be the direct cause of changes or modifications in another substance, it can yet act as a helping, contributing, subsidiary or auxiliary, external cause (nimitta)in the modifications of that substance. Thus, even though water is liquid and coolness is its intrinsic nature, the fire can cause it not only to become hot (a change in the condition or state of its quality) but also transform or change it into steam or gas, i.e. a change in its form. And, according to Spinoza, the substance cannot be changed from within, since, if it were, one state of Substance would be different from the another, and we should no longer be able to define as Substance as that which is "conceived through itself," since it would now have to be conceived as that which is "potentially liable to become 'that other?.'16 The misconception in this case is that "that other," to which condition, form, or mode it is now changed, is only a change or modification in the external form or in the state or condition of an attribute of that substance, though the substance itself remains the same. The substance persists through change; only the potentiality, which was already latent in the substance or the organism, has now become the actuality, and that is a kind of change, which we know as growth or development. Such kind of changes are latent or in-built in the substances. They become so and so, Aristotle stated, "because they are so and so, for the process of Becoming or development attends upon Being and is for the sake of Being, not vice versa."17