Jain Journal 2012 07

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

Page 34

Anupam Jash: Jaina Logic of Syādvada-Saptabhangīnaya
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absolute judgment, predicating an attribute of a real or its negation. All judgments about a real are qualified with the proviso 'syat', - 'in some respect' or 'in some context' keeping in mind that the predication of an attribute is bound up with the possibility of its negation, the Jaina philosopher speak of seven mutually consistent qualified judgment about a real with respect to a predication or its opposite. Each number of the Jaina sevenfold predication answers to a distinct attributes. And any premutation and combination of the seven members would not lead to any enlargement in the number of predications for the reason that it would fail to represent the predication of any new attribute other than already represented in the sevenfold predication. If we combine the first and the third bhanga (predication), we can easily see that, this combination fails to answer to any new attribute other than the one revealed in the third. Let us state for an instance that the first and the third predication respectively as 'in some respect the pot exist' and 'in some respect the pot exist and some (other) respect the pot does not exist'. It is easy to see that the first bhanga (predication), 'in some respect the pot exist' occurs twice over in the combined judgment and fails to add anything new by way of content to the judgment. According to modern western logic also 'in some respect the pot exist and in some respect the pot exist' is logically equivalent to 'in some respect the pot exist' (as 'p.p' is equivalent to 'p'). Therefore, the combination of the first and the third bhangas under consideration reduces to the third bhangas. A similar line of argument would show that combination of the second and the third bhangas would reduce to the third bhangas.
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The fourth bhanga asserts the simultaneous existence and nonexistence of a real, in our example 'the pot'. Viewed from the point of view of formal logic, this is a outright contradiction and cannot represent the feature of the real object. But the Jaina philosophers think that both existence and non-existence, or for that matter any other attribute or its opposites coming together in a simultaneous assertions of the fourth bhanga kind have equal or co-ordinate status,