Jain Thought and Culture

Author(s): G C Pandey
Publisher: University of Rajasthan

Page 12

Jain Thought and Culture
make purposive action possible tentative and fragmentary knowledge, which is all we usually have in the contexts of practical urgency, must be held to have a definite though limited reliability and must be regarded as revealing real though partial aspects of things
The Jainas accepted and formulated these implications in the course of their philosophization Thus as early as the Ayaramga the Nirgrantha is declared to be a believer in the Soul, the world and Will (Ayavai, loyavai, Kıriyavai) The classic definition of reality "Utpadavyaya-dhrauvyayuktam sat follows in this same directon, and the logical doctrines of Anekanta, Naya and Syadvada represent its culminating refinement
Jana logic has often been misunderstood by its critics as implying a denial of the law of contradiction and hence as itself contradictory The point of Jaina Logic is philosophical viz , that the really genuine way in which a thinker should seek knowledge is not by creating a private or purely hypothetical world which achieves formal consistency by depending entirely on a process of arbitrary definition and the exclusion of empirical significance, but by remembering the complex and variable nature of reality and thus holding that every judgment about it where abstraction necessarily enters, 18 meaningful and true only under certain conditions Thought can't afford to become a Procrustean bed, especially when Reality is Protean This is the common assumption of scientific as well as historical thinking Inliustrating the self-contradiction' of Jaina Lagic as 'Sitosnavat' Sankaracharya (Comm BS 22 33 ) has unwittingly shown its strength In experience, 'heat' and 'cold' are relative terms and by adopting two different standards the same thing can be described as 'hot' or 'cold' The great Vachaspati Misra realizing this weakness of the Master's illustration has to step outside empirical knowledge and adduce Brahman and Prapancha as examples of absolute being and non-being
Basically, rational thought seeks practically significant knowledge in understanding major philosophies the important thing is not to bring out their obvious mutual inconsistencies and serious inner inconsistencies which are either rare or only apparent due to an unavoidable ‘sickness of language' or the application of a purely negative dialectic, but to discover the empirical and logical conditions which lend them plausibility and value