Jaina Biology

Author(s): J C Sikdar
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 13

Jaina Biology
Biology as an organized science can be said to have begun with the Greeks 11 in the West on the basis of the knowledge of such basic facts as which plants and which animals were useful as food and medicine. “ They and the Romans described the many kinds of plants and animals known at the time.”'12
Galen (131-200 A. D. ), 13 the first experimental physiologist, made experiments to study the functions of nerves and blood vessels. Biology expanded and underwent alteration greately in the nineteenth century, and it has continued this trend at an accelerated pace in the twentieth century due to the discoveries and techniques of physics and chemistry. Sources of Scientific Information on Jaina Biology :
The ultimate source of each fact of Jaina Biology contained in the Jaina Āgamic and post-Agamic works is in some carefully controlled observation made by the Jainācāryas. They have made a discovery in the world of life, plants and animals, by their critical observation on them; they have described their methods in details so that their followers can repeat them, have given the result of their observations, discussed the conclusions to be drawn from them, perhaps formulated a theory to explain them, and indicated the place of these biological facts in the present body of scientific knowledge contained in the Jaina Āgamas.
The Scientific Method:
The facts of Jaina Biology as embodied in the Jaina canons are gained by the application of the scientific method, yet it is difficult to reduce this method to a simple set of rules of modern Biology that can be applied to the Jaina biological science, because the sceptical scientists of modern age want confirmation of the statement by the independent observation of another in any scientific investigation. • “The basis of the scientific method and the ultimate source of all facts of science is careful, close observation and experiment, free of bias, with suitable controls and done as quantitatively as possible."'14 The observations made by the Jainācāryas on the world of life, plants and animals, may be analyzed, or simplified into their constituent parts in the light of modern Biology, so that some sort of order can be brought into the observed phenomena. Then the parts can be synthesized or reassembled and their interaction and interrelations
11. Biology, p. 1. 12. Ibid. 13. 1bid., p. 3 14. Ibib, p. 3.