Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

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

Page 317

300 Anekāntavāda and Syādvāda
that is epistemically given to us is given in course of time and since epistemically any descriptive statement about a thing presuppose maximally the totality of such features that are either collectively or alternatively given to us in course of time, either along with the emergence of a thing or in course of its life-history, a thing is also defined as the one that has many (literally innumerable) such factures. 16 The reason being that a thing can change and through a change can come to have newer and newer features and never shall we be in a position to say that a thing has so many features and not more. A statement about a thing can be made only with reference to the given occasion. If we make a statement about a thing independently of the stipulation of occasion it would hardly be informative in the genuine sense of the term.
A thing does not have those and only those features that are given to us in experience. Better it is to say that a thing either has at least these features which it is now having or those which it would have in the course of time. Thus a thing potentially has not only those features that are actualized but also those which were or will be actualised. That is, a thing potentially has all the features, whether they are actualized or not. This is how a thing is also defined as that which is beset with totality of all features potentially."
If we bring to bear these three descriptions of the nature of a thing upon one another then it turns out that the possibilities that we can envisage with regard to a thing fall readily into two groups: (a) epistemic possibilities--the ones which figure in the descriptive statement about a thing, and (b) possibilties understood as capabilities, abilities or dispositions. Here capacities or dispositions or potentialities are understood perhaps as a sub-visible structure of a thing. Unless a thing has potentialities they will never be actualised. It is in this sense that dispositional possibilities are prior to epistemic possibilities. But, contrarywise, all our statements about dispositions of a thing are anchored in epistemic possibilities and which are, therefore, prior to possibilities as potentialities. But the features a thing comes to have either as differentia or otherwise are those and only those, it is maintained by Jaina philosophers and logicians, which it must have as dispositions. It is in this sense that epistemic possibilities presuppose possibilities as potentialities.
One important question arises here. Granting that there are
16. Umäsvāti :Tattvärthādhigamasutra, V. 37 17. Kundakunda : Pravacanasāra, I. 49.