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
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The Doctrine of Syādvāda 327
itself. The doctrine of syādvāda represents one aspect of the Jain doctrine of Manysidedness of anekāntavāda. And Implicit in the epistemological relativity of anekāntavāda is a recognition that the world is more complex than it seems, that reality is more subtle than we are inclined to believe. Our knowledge is less certain than we think”.4 Indeed "The Jains think that reality is so complex in its structure that...its precise nature baffles all attempts to describe it directly and once for all; but it is not impossible to make it known through a series of partially true statements without committing ourselves to any one among them exclusively. Accordingly the Jains enunciate its nature in seven steps, described as the sapta-bhangi or "the seven-fold formula”. These steps are :
(1) Somehow a thing is. (2) Somehow it is not. (3) Somehow it both is and is not. (4) Somehow it is indescribable. (5) Somehow it is and is indescribable. 6) Somehow it is not and is indescribable. (7) Somehow it is, is not, and is indescribable.
Thus 'For example, we may say a jar is somehow, i.e., it exists, if we mean thereby that it exists as a jar; but it does not exist somehow if we mean that it exists as a cloth or the like... Thus we have the correlative predicates ''is'' (asti) and is not" (nästi). A third predicate is 'inexpressible' (avaktavya); for existent and non-existent (sat and asat) belong to the same thing at the same time, and such a co-existence of mutually contradictory attributes cannot be expressed by any word in the language. The three predicates variously combined make up the 7 propositions, or sapta bhangas, of the Syādväda'7
4. Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., op. cit., p. 72. 5. M. Hiriyanna, op. cit., p. 164. 6. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C.A. Moore, eds., A Source Book of Indian
Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 261. Hermann Jacobi, op. cit., p. 468. The word syat in syädväda needs to be understood carefully. It has the sense of 'somehow' (ibid., p. 468) rather than 'may be' (Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., op. cit., p. 70; S. Gopalen, op. cit., pp. 251-253). For a modern discussion of this point see Satischandra Chatterjee and Dhirendramohan Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (University of Calcutta, 1968), pp. 83, 86; for a medieval discussion see Madhavācārya, Sarvadarśanasangraha, Chapter III. It may be added that 'earliest mention of the doctrine of syādvada and saptabhangi probably occurs in Bhadrabahu's commentary (433-357 B.C.) Sutrakitānganiryuki' (S.N. Dasgupta, op. cit., p. 181, fn. 1). For more on its origins see Wolfgang Beurlen, op. cit., p. 164.
