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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Syādvāda and the Modern Scientific Theory of Relativity 353
indestructible and permanent in respect to its root, substance and its root nature, but it is destructible with respect to its capacity of modification or change every moment. There can be no destruction without its existence and beginning. Without existence and destruction there can be no beginning. Jain neither accepts momentarism nor eternalism only. Let us take an example of golden ring. When we destroy the golden ring and change it into necklace then there is an end or destruction of the golden ring and beginning or birth of a neclace but as gold it is eternal or has got permanent existence. In the same way every thing is one and many at one and the same time. Pot in respect to pot is one but in respect to its atom it is many. Thus we must note that there is nothing wrong in having these opposite qualities in a thing all at one and the same time. But there is wrong in not having them all at one and the same time. Opposition is seen due to ignorance of the real knowledge of the nature of things. One and the same person is husband and not husband, father and son both at the same time. The same man is not father and husband only but he may be at one and same time uncle, nephew, son, friend, enemy, secretary, president etc., also, there is nothing wrong in it. He is father of his son and son of his father, uncle of nephew and nephew of his uncle and so on. He is husband of his own wife, not of all the ladies of the world. He is father of his own son and not the father of the whole of the world and so on. Thus there is no absolute truth. Every statement is relative. We see contradictions only due to our ignorance like the concepts of blind men about the elephant. All our conflicts are due to our limited knowledge. All the things of the world are related to one another without any exception. By saying Indian we have the concept of non-Indian, by the concept of man we at once have the concept of non-human. Thus by the knowledge of one we get the relative knowlege of all the other remaining things. Due to this relativeness in mind Mahavir said that who knows one object with all its qualities and attributes, he knows all the things and who knows all the things with all their qualities he knows one.
By all this is becomes clear that every thing is having infinite number of attributes and has got infinite number of relations with all other things. Only Kevali the Universal observer can have direct knowledge of a thing with all its qualities and relations. We ordinary persons can know every thing in relation to time, space and our own angle of vision only. At one time we can know onlyone quality. Taking
