Ethical Doctrines in Jainism

Author(s): Kamalchand Sogani
Publisher: Jain Sanskruti Samrakshak Sangh Solapur

Page 37

METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF JAINA ETHICS
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and the Buddha denounced everything as fleeting and sorrowful and pointed to the futility of all speculation, Mahāvira adhered to the common experience, found no contradiction between permanence and change, and was free from all absolutismo.”
MEANING OF THE TERM 'EXPERIENCE': It will not be out of place to mention the comprehensive meaning of the term 'experience' adopted by the Jaina philosophers. The term 'experience has been construed in its comprehensive denotation as including all the five types of knowledge, namely, Mati (Sensuous), Sruta (Scriptural), Avadhi (Intuition of material objects, or Clairvoyance), Manahparyāya (Intuition of mental modes) and Kevala (Perfect knowledge or Omniscience). The first two come under Paroksa, since they need external sense-organs and mind for their birth and the other three are classified under Pratyaksa, inasmuch as they are born independently of the sense-organs and mind. The last three types of knowledge are the privilege and prerogative of some selected few, namely, Yogis; but Mati and Sruta are given to all. Mati includes inference, memory, recognition etc.; and experience includes Pratyaksa and Paroksa types of knowledge. Thus, Sensuous and Intellectual knowledge are as much a part of experience as the transcendental one. Sensuous and intellectual experience are also real, though they do not possess the clarity of the transcendental one. Intuitive experience does not contradict the intellectual one, but only surpasses it in scope, extension and clarity.
There is another way of understanding the meaning of the term, 'experience'. Experience should not be understood to mean narrow empiricism or sensationalism in the Lockian sense, nor mere rationalism in the Descartian sense, but it should be understood in antagonism to the Kantian sense. To make it more clear, according to Kant, "the understanding has different forms of conceiving or relating or connecting percepts; they are called pure concepts or categories of the understanding, because they are a priori and not derived from experience”.? But, according to the Jaina, the categories or the pure concepts are not only mental phenomena, but are also trans-subjective in character. In other words, they are both subjective and objective. Again, in accordance with Kant, “sensibility furnishes us with objects or percepts, empirical intuitions as he sometimes calls them”.8 and the universal forms are
1 Studies in Jaina Philosophy, p. 18. 2 History of Philosophy (Indian edition 1949) pp. 364, 365. 3 Ibid. p. 361.