Jain Journal 2000 07

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

Page 23

BHATTACHARYA: SYADVĀDA IN THE VIEW OF THREE MODERN SCIENTISTS
Syadvāda is also called anekāntavāda, pluralism. According to this system all objects are multiform. So all judgements are bound to be relative. They may be true under certain conditions, but not so under others. They are thus always conditional and hypothetical. No judgements are absolutely true under all circumstances. That is why the word, syat must be added to all judgements to indicate their conditional character.
L
R
Now we may give a more complex instance. This is how D.S. Kothari puts it: "Consider the following idealized situation, or "thought Illustration experiment," discussed by Heisenberg. There is an atom in a closed box that is divided by a partition into two equal compartments. The partition has a very small hole so that the atom can pass through it. The hole can be closed by a shutter, if desired. According to classical logic, the atom will be either in the left compartment (L) or in the right compartment (R). There is no third possibility. But quantum physics forces us to admit other possibilities to explain adequately the results of experiments. If we use the words "box" and "atom" at all, then there is no escape whatsoever from admitting that in some strange way, which totally defies description in words, the same atom is, at the same time, in both compartments (when the hole is open). Such a situation cannot be expressed properly in ordinary language-it is inexpressible (except mathematically)."6
ATOM
Kothari then adds, "... it is avayakta (avaktavyah) in the terminology of Syādvāda. It is an idea crazy beyond words. But there is no escape; for, totally unlike large objects, particles at the atomic level exhibit a wave aspect as well as a particle aspect. These two aspects, which are contradictory and mutually exclusive in the everyday domain, are complementary in atomic phenomena."
6.
It is interesting to note that, without knowing anything about the wave and particle aspects, the Jain philosophers had speculated "that things are real, so far as they have a self-identity of their own unshared by others (svarūpa-sattā), and they are unreal in respect of a different self-identity (pararupa-sattā)....The logic of Jaina is empirical logic,
Kothari, p. 327.
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