Jain Journal 1966 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 12

52
parison with the notion of a higher reality, the fault does not lie in the notion but in reality itself. As C. W. Miller says, "It reminds one of a great mountain which represents a particular contour when approached from one direction but an entirely different aspect from another. Only as we live in the many little valleys that nestle into its flanks and as we climb through its ravines and its ridges can we truly say that we know the mountain."11
JAIN JOURNAL
The main reason why other Indian systems have failed to appreciate the scientific accuracy of anekāntavāda is that while the Jainas are viewing reality as it appears to be, most other systems being baffled by its variety and multiplicity have outright rejected it as illusion (māyā) and have superimposed on it an imaginary structure called a transcendental reality. As the Upanisad says, 'one I became many' (ekoham bahusyām). If empirical reality is conceived to emanate from a transcendental reality, it is also conceived to terminate in the latter, to re-emanate from it again. In this view, the one thing permanent is the transcendental reality; all else has genesis and termination and is by nature ever-changing. This sort of view is basically different from the Jaina view of reality which is all a timeless plurality. Even the Jaina notion of the highest knowledge that comes to the free (kevalajñāna) which has been wrongly conceived by many as the knowledge of the absolute really stands for a complete and correct knowledge of reality in its multifarious aspects-'the highest form of knowledge as comprehending all things and all their modifications'. In breaking away from the absolutist abstraction, the Jainas have not been a victim of any illogicity; rather, their whole logic is well-conceived in the very notion of the jivas and the ajivas both of which are innumerable beyond count and are ever-existent in their own right. They have neither emanated from an absolute like a tree from a seed, nor is the end-process in their view a merging in the absolute. Even after the soul attains the highest status, its separate indentity is never lost. Even here the monistic writers have tried to put a distorted interpretation of the Jaina view by suggesting that since the entire variety of the physical universe is one kind of substance called matter (pudgala) and since all jivas are one kind and since the two are, instead of being two absolutes like the puruşa and prakṛti in Sankhya, in actual relation with each other, surely there must be a superior third party to establish this relation and to whose generosity and magnanimity the jiva must depend for its termination. Some have even gone to the extreme of suggesting that the Jainas conceive of jivu being allotted one ajiva. Thus for instance Hiriyanna writes, "The necessary implication of Jaina thought in this respect is therefore a single spiritual substance encountering a single material substance. And since these substances are interdependent, the