Book Title: Jain Journal 1999 01
Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

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Page 24
________________ JAIN JOURNAL: Vol-XXXIII, No. 3 January 1999 philosophy. As already indicated in the beginning of our paper, the Jaina is a professed realist depending upon the deliverances of common sense and experience. Experience reveals that a real is manifold in its facets or characters which it is impossible for experience to exhaust. So he begins by pointing out that it would be wrong to view the real absolutely in terms of one characteristic. The immediate target of his attack is on the one hand the Advaitist absolutism of the one spiritual real the atman, static and immutable in essence and on the other absolute phenomenalism of the Buddhist to whom change to the only reality. Each of these angles of thought is an Ekanta or one extreme, and thus fails of its purpose of delivering us the truly concrete real which is neither purely static and immutable nor is pure change without the background of the changeless. The Jaina goes even deeper into the question and avers that the real may be regarded from one stand point as existent and from another, as non-existent, that we may...the real as conditions and circumstance under which we view it and the Jaina has given us these conditions and circumstances which are four in number, viz. the substance (dravya) of the real, its state (bhāva), the time (kāla) and the space (desa) in which it exists. From each of these conditions and circumstances the same real will be regarded as existent and will be regarded as non-existent from the condition and circumstances other than the given one. Similarly the Jaina will regard the real as sāmānya or the universal from one standpoint and viseșa or particular from another standpoint, it will be regarded as nitya or eternal from one standpoint and anitya or noneternal from another. In one of word the Jaina is Chary of committing himself to one-sidedness in his view the real, for the real for sooth, is aneka-dharmatmaka or manifold in character. The Jaina contends, very much in the same spirit as the modern realist and pragmatist that in spite of the privative or relative character of the specific concepts or judgments, the Vedantist, the Sankhyist, the Nyaya-vaiseṣika thinkers and the Buddhists have each in his own way taken specific concepts or judgements, to represent the whole or absolute truth and have been led to the supposition that because a thing has one definable character it cannot have any other, that the formal principle of Identity or of contradiction has invulnerable rigidity alike in the realms of thought and things. An unbiased examination of facts, however, reveals the contrary. Each object of our experience to a home of apparently contradictory characters, a harbour of opposites which are governed not by the principle of contradiction, but only by principle of contrariety rendering them predicable of the reality under alternative conditions. Hence the Jaina directs it dialectic still against what William James calls "Vicious Intellectualism or "Abstractionism", as exhibited by each 98 Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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