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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362 Anekāntavāda and Syādvāda
Each one perceives a certain aspect of the real and congratulates himself that this is the only reality. When reality would not fit in with his own petty frame work, then there is the ruthless pruning and chopping to make it convenient.S
Finite beings as we are, we do not have an immediate knowledge of an object in all its innumerable aspects that a Kevali (one who has attained Kevela Jnāna, i.e., an omniscient being) possesses. Such is the implication of the Theory of Relativity also. Albert Einstein says, We can only know the relative truth, the Absolute truth is known only to the Universal Observer."
Let us refer to certain examples that are given by Syādvāda and Relativity. We already had occasion to refer to one classical illustration of the seven blind men and the elephant. Each of these men laid their hands on a different portion of the elephant and tried to picture the whole animal as a winnowing fan, a big round pillar and so on. Here we see the case where the partial description of an animal leads to partial truth and this is due to defective perception but only the man who perceives the whole can recognise each of their descriptions as a partial truth. So too it is with our empirical knowledge. It is relative to the standpoint which one adopts in determining characters of the things perceived and so becomes fallacious if taken as absolute and entire. It is said that once two knights began to quarrel with each other because each maintained that the side he saw was the whole truth. Syādvāda or “the science of Assertion of Alternative Possibilities' is corrective of the fallacy into which the knights fell. Tom Smith, for example may be a son with reference to his father John Smith; he may be a father with reference to Willy Smith. Thus we see that two apparently contradictory attributes or characteristics of the same person, thing or event may be found to be true, if the trouble is taken to bear in mind the point of view adopted.
Prof. Albert Einstein makes use of illustrations. Let us refer to the event which, we say, is taking place today or just now or again that two events are simultaneous. “In pre-relativistic physics, time and space were separate entities. Specifications of time were independent of the choice of the space of reference. The Newtonian mechanics was relative with respect to the space of reference, so that, e.g. the statement that two non-simultaneous events happened at the
8. 'Panchāstikāya-Jaina Logic' (P. LXII-LXIII). 9. Cosmology-Old And New', p. 201.
