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JAINAS ON TESTIMONY
139 to ascerain the validity of the knowledge, he will have to examine whether his anderstnding of the meaning of a sentence is correct and whether his knowledge of the speaker's authoritativeness is true. Of the two, it is the second that requires close scrutiny and critical exmination. So, the question as to how we can determine the authoritativeness of a speaker is of prime importance in testimony.
There are four conditions that characterise an āpta : (1) He should know correctly the fact stated by him. (2) He should have no desire to deceive others. (3) He should have a desire to speak out the truth. (4) He should have his sense-organs in perfect order. Out of these four, the first two are really important. Capacity to know things as they are and absence of the disire to deceive others are invariably related with freedom from narrow love and harted." Dharmakīrti is right when he observes that universal love is the prime condition that makes a man reliable and truthful, i.e., āpta. 18. A man impelled by universal love would never think of deceiving others and would always exert himself to know as precisely as possible the ways of freeing man from worldly misery. Even the Jainas hold the same view."
It is interesting to note that the conditions regarded necessary to make a person an authority are more or less similar in all the systems of Indian philosophy. But opinions are divided on the question as to how to ascertain whether a particular person is an authority or not. A Jaina logician Akalanka recognises the possibility of the knowledge of internal quality, viz., absence of narrow love and hatred which, as we have already seen, makes a person an authority. He opines that man's good and bad overt behaviour is governed by and caused respectively by his internal good and bad qualities. And hence from the good overt behaviour we can infer the internal good quality, viz., absence of narrow love and hatred. But Dharmakirti is of the opinion that the character of man is not easy to discern. The overt behaviour mainly depends on human will, and if a man wills to behave in such a fashion as would not disclose his internal qualities he can do so. He may be a hypocrite. He may put on the air of a righteous man, while he may not be so in reality. Even a villain may pretend to be virtuous. So, overt behaviour cannot always enable us to infer correctly the internal quality and ultimately the reliability or otherwise of a person.20 So, he supplies us with another criterion for the ascertainment of authoritativeness or reliability. It is coherence in the body of what he has said and written, 21 and non-contradiction of it by perception and inference.22 Even
