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ANEKANTAVADA in the light of Relativity
KASTUR CHAND LALWANI
"...an emotion which can be destroyed by a little mathematics is neither very genuine nor very valuable."
-Bertrand Russell
[It is not intended in this brief study to expound the doctrine of anekanta. This has already been done by many competent scholars. It is, however, intended to discover its scientific content and rehabilitate it on a firmer foundation. Anekantavāda is in a sense the philosophical forerunner of scientific relativity and just as in the domain of science, the coming of relativity has been a major blow to the CopernicusGalileo-Newton stand, so also in the realm of philosophy, ekāntavāda which is rooted in emotionalism should have succumbed to anekāntavāda. But this did not happen. The ekantavadins who are in the majority all the world over have stuck to their emotional creation and imposed a distortion on anekantavāda on the basis of their own logic, seeking to establish that the logic of anekāntavāda is illogical and its philosophy is absurd. Besides, there is the terminological confusion. According to the Jaina view, ekanta is one angle of vision, one view-point, and hence by definition it is less than perfect, less than comprehensive, since there may be, and in actuality are, other angles of vision, other view-points. A full and perfect knowledge means a comprehensive knowledge about the most-complicated and many-faceted reality. Ekanta in the Vedantic sense, however, signifies a transcendental reality as distinct from the empirical reality-a reality from which the latter emerges and into which the latter merges. Since empirical reality, according to the Vedantin, is only a fractional manifestation of the bigger transcendental reality1, to know the latter is to know the former, but not just the other way round. The Jainas, however, do not recognise this transcendental reality as a separate and superior entity. And this is at the root of the non-appreciation of the Jaina view-point by the ekantavädins and its distorted presentation by them. ]
To a world which is nurtured on the idea of an Absolute2, call it God, or X, Y or Z, the notion of anekanta, one of the most original contributions of the Jainas, has always appeared no more than a common
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