Book Title: Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture
Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
________________
174 Anekāntavāda and Syādvāda
are also interrelated, and make a system. Existence and non-existence are mutually concomitant and they together qualify the same object.$3 All the seven propositions follow logically from this dictum. In fact, the very first proposition, when logically unfolded, leads to the other six as a matter of necessity. Each proposition taken singly is also significant in that it "ccnsitutes", in the words of Professor Mookerjee, "an estimation of reality, which has been either advocated by a school of philosophers as a matter of historical fact or is capable of being entertained as a possible evaluation.'34 But an isolate proposition, according to the Jaina philosopher, does not give the whole truth. It may, on the contrary, give an untruth, if taken as negation of other truths; and it can at best, provided it only asserts itself without negating others, give a partial truth, that is, naya which is described as neither truth nor untruth.SS The Jaina philosopher, therefore, rejects the validity of the isolated propositions because they stand for extremisms, and knits them together into a system which is known as non-extremism or non-absolutism (anekāntavāda.).
Pramāna-saptabhangi and Naya-saptabhangi Pramāna stands for the whole truth' and Naya, as just stated, is
neither truth nor untruth, but only a partial truth'; in other words, if the pramāna is a comprehensive view of reality, the naya is only a partial view of it in the sense that it takes into consideration only a particular aspect of the whole situation. In its widest sense, the term 53. Bfisici efezfarsfaitezte feffori
विशेषणत्वात् साधर्म्यं यथा भेदविवक्षया॥ नास्तित्वं प्रतिपेय॑नाऽविनाभाव्येकधर्मिणि।
fauCTE JETRE TOT PETITE -AM, 17-8. 54. For further details, see JPN, pp. 166 seq. 55. Cf. TWITT W AT 71 CAT 4:1
PITT M ITT HUVATTET: 11 TSV, p. 123. In this connection one may read with interest the following note of Bradley; "And hence it follows also that every part of this whole must be internally defective and (when thought) contradictory. For otherwise how from one to others and the rest could there be any internal passage ? And without such a passage and with but an external junction or bond, could there be any system or whole at all which would satisfy the intellect, and could be taken as real or possible ? I at least have given my reason for answering this question in the negative. We may even, forgetting other points of view, say of the world,
Thus every part is full of vice,
yet the whole mass a paradise." Appearance and Reality, P. 510. 56. See TSV, p. 118 (verse 3).
