Fundamentals Of Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Veer Nirvan Bharti

Page 15

THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY
confusion of thought, and we might also say the animosity existing between the followers of different rcligions, would cease to exist as soon as they would test the scriptural text which most of us blindly adhere to with the aid of the touch-stone of nayavada (the philosophy of stand-points). If they would only insert the word 'somehow' before any scriptural or prophetic, statement, they would find their minds becoming trained in the right direction to enquirc into the stand-point of the prophct who made any particular statement. The word 'somehow' (Syât is Sanskrit) would show that the statement was made from a particular point of vicw, and would at once direct the mind to find out what that stand-point is. It would also enable us to reconcile many a seemingly contradictory statement in the scriptures of the same creed as well as in those of different faiths; for it does often happen that a statement which is wrong from one particular point of view is not so from another, c.g., one observer might say that a bowl full of water contains no air, while another might describe it as containing nothing else but air, both being right from their respective stand-points since water is only gaseous matter in its essence though manifested in the form of a liquid substance owing to the action of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen on one another.
For the above reason the Jaina Siddhanta insists on the employment of the word sjât (somehow or from a particular point of view) before every judgment or statement of fact, though in ordinary parlance and composition it is generally dispensed with. There are three kinds of judgment, the affirmative, the negative and the one which gives expression to the idea of indescribableness. Of these, the first kind affirms and the second denies the existence of a quality, property or thing, but the third declares an object to be indescribable. A thing is said to be indesuribable when both existence and non-existence are to be attributed to it at one and the same time. These three forms of judgment give rise to seven possible modes of predication which are set out below:
(1) Syâdasti (somehow, i.e., from some particular point of view, a thing may be said to exist),
(2) Syânnāsti (somehow the thing does not exist),