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Panchastikayará
67 Vedânta Sútra, Sankara and Râmânuja. The Sätra that is commented on is ***HET ” (CH. I, PADA 2, Su. 33).
“This doctrine we meet as follows: Your reasoning, we say, is inadmissible 'on account of the impossibility in one thing'. That is to say, it is impossible that contradictory attributes such as being and non-being should at the same time belong to one and the same thing; just as observation teaches us that a thing cannot be hot and cold the same moment. The seven categories asserted by you must either be so many and such, or not be so many and such; the third alternative expressed in the words 'they either are such, or not such results in a cognition of indefinite nature which is no more a source of true knowledge, than doubt is. If you should plead that the cognition that a thing is of more than one nature is definite and therefore a source of true knowledge, we deny this. For the unlimited assertion that all things are of a non-exclusive nature is itself something, falls as such under the alternative predications 'somehow it is' 'somehow it is not and so ceases to be a definite assertion. The same happens to the person making the assertion and to the result of the assertion; partly they are, partly they are not. As thus the means of knowledge, the object of knowledge, the knowing subject, and the act of knowledge are all alike indenfinite, how can the Tîrthamkara (Jina) teach with any claim to authority and how can his followers act on a doctrine the matter of which is altogether indeterminate ? Observation shows that only when a course of action is known to have a definite result, people set about it without hesitation. Hence a man who proclaims a doctrine of altogether indefinite contents does not deserve to be listened to any more than a drunken man or a mad man. Again, if we apply the Jaina reasoning to their doctrine of the five categories, we have to say that on one view of the matter they are five and on another view they are not five; from which latter point of view it follows that they are either fewer or more than five. Nor is it logical to declare the categories to be indescribable. For if they are so, they cannot be described; but, as a matter of fact they are described so that to call them indescribable involves a contradiction. And if you go on
t the categories on being described are ascertained to be such and , and at the same time are not ascertained to be such and such, and that the result of their being ascertained is perfect knowledge or is not perfect knowledge, and that imperfect knowledge is the opposite of perfect knowledge or is not the opposite; you certainly talk more like a drunken or insane man than like a sober, trustworthy person. If you further maintain that the heavenly world and final release exist or do not exist and are eternal or non-eternal, the absence of all determinate knowledge which is employed in such statement will result in nobody's acting for the purpose of gaining the heavenly world and final release. And moreover it follows from your doctrine that soul, non-soul and so on, whose nature you claim to have ascertained, and which you describe as having existed from all eternity, relapse all at once into the condition of absolute indetermination. As
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