Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 204

Non-Absolutism (Anekāntavada) 187
Even the Buddhist cannot deny that the selfsame real, e.g.. light, produces diverse effects, viz., the expulsion of darkness, the illumination oï the field of perception, radiation of heat and so on. Certainly the diverse effects cannot be produced by the selssame causal energy. If a plurality of energies can be possessed by a self-identical entity without offence to logic, why should the spectre of logical incompatibility be raised in the case of a permanent cause possessing diverse powers ? The Jaina solves the difficulty by means of the law of anekānta, which affirms the possibility of diverse attributes in a unitary entity, Strictly speaking, a thing is neither an absolute unity nor split up into an irreconcilable plurality. It is both unity and plurality all the time. There is no opposition between unity of being and plurality of aspects. The opposition would have been inevitable if the unity of a real had varied with each aspect. But the varying aspects are affirmed of the self-identical subject and this proves that the unity is not affected by such predication. A thing is one and many at the same time—a unity and a plurality rolled into one. This view of the nature of reality avoids the fallacy of uncaused production, which is insurmountable in the other philosophies. The cause is both non-synchronous and synchronous with the effect--the former before the origin of the effect and the latter at the time of its origin. Nor does the non-emergence of any further effect in the presence of the cause after the production of the first effect occasion a difficulty. The nature of things is to be determined in consonance with their behaviour as observed with normal human faculties. When the cause is not seen to produce an effect more than once at a time, it must be postulated that the cause undergoes change of power, and the change of power is not incompatible with the identity of the causal entity as it is certified by the unchallengeable verdict of experience. That experience is the ultimate determinant of contradiction or non-contradiction and not a priori logical considerations is to be admitted even by the Buddhist, who swears by logic in season and out of season whenever it suits his convenience. The Buddhist idealist hoids that cognition assumes the form of congniser and cognised in one. The same cognition is transformed into the likeness of an object, which tecomes the content, and in its role as pure cognition it functions as the cogniser. This is the epistemology of perception of the Sautrántika realist, according to whom the direct object of cognition is never the external object, but the content as part and parcel of the cognition. The external object is a matter of inference.