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JAIN JOURNAL
the whole Truth dawns upon him automatically just as a mirror begins to reflect things when dust is wiped off from its surface; that is, we can know the truth by Eye Divine or divya-drșți. This is one way of knowing the truth where there are no chances of making any mistake through illusion. The second method is the method adopted by the modern science, viz. experimental. Experiments are performed by different people all over the world; and if they arrive at the same result the conclusion drawn is regarded as correct or true. Even some scientists of today are of opinion that the experimental method is not the only method of arriving at the truth.
Without going into philosophical implications of Omniscience as defined by Jaina Acaryas, I am giving below some points in answer to a question once asked by a friend of mine, namely 'what evidence is there to prove that the Jaina Tirthankaras were Omniscient ?'
The ancient writers, like the author of Nandi Sutra, have tried to overawe us by saying that the Fourteen Pūrvas which constitute a negligible portion of the entire Jaina canon, required such a huge sea of ink into which over sixteen thousand elephants, one mounted over the other, would be completely submerged or that it will take a few billion years to utter the twelve Angas of Jaina vāņi at the rate of a few thousand words per minute. Naturally, words spoken so fast would lose their intelligibility and would appear like a row of thunder. So, they said that the entire body of a Tirthankara vibrates and the sound produced is inarticulate which is analysed into different languages of human beings, and those of birds and beasts, as if by some natural process akin to the mechanical process adopted in the meetings of the United Nations where the talk of a speaker in any language is automatically analysed and heard in the language of one's choice.
In the modern age of science, arguments of the above type would be regarded as silly to prove the perfection of knowledge of any person on earth. But the whole problem cannot be dismissed cursorily. We take points one after the other.
(1) The Unit of Three Dimensional Space: It corresponds to Euclidean space point. In Jaina terminology it is called pradeśa and has been defined as the smallest volume of space in which only one atom can reside, but in which an infinite number of atoms can reside under special circumstances. This is a contradiction in itself. How can an infinite number of atoms occupy the same space which only one atom occupies ? And the answer given is sukşma-pariņāma-avagāhana-Śakti-yogāt (on account of the
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