Book Title: Jaina Ontology
Author(s): K K Dixit
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Page 110
________________ THE AGE OF LOGIC 97 one and the same time. And this way of looking at things was certainly a comparatively later growth. True, even in Bhagavati a question was often answered in terms of two mutually contradictory features, for instance, when it was said that during the process of transmigration a being possesses body and also does not (the formar when taijasa and kārmaņa types of bodies are taken into consideration the latter when the remaining types), or that during the same process a being possesses sense-organs and also does not (the former when bhavendriyas are taken into consideration the latter when dravyendriyas). But these could hardly be called cases of vindicating Anekāntavāda. Some sort of a move in that direction was made in connection with formulating the doctrine of seven nayas, for here two nayas (e.g. sangraha and rjusülra) seem to have been so conceived that they take diametrically opposed stands on one and the same questions. But even the Naya doctrine as originally understood does not have it for its central feature that diametrically opposed stands be taken on one and the same question. It was only when the sevenfold division of nayas was replaced by a twofold division that the assignment of two mutually contradictory features to the same thing at the same time became a central feature of the Naya doctrine. However, the twofold division of nayas into dravyāstika and paryāyāstika was made possible by the earlier evolved tradition of difining reality as possessed of origination, destruction and permanence. Thus the real credit for sowing the seed of Anekantavada within the field of Jaina philosophical speculation goes to the present definition of reality. To be sure, change and permanence constitute the first pair of contradictory features whose joint observation all around led the Jaina theoreticians to formulate and elaborate the doctrine of Anekantavada. For starting from here they soon discovered that similarity and dissimilarity, unity and plurality, separateness and non-separateness, relatedness and non-relatedness etc. constitute other important pairs of contradictory features which characterise things no less markedly than does the pair consisting of the contra. dictory features change and permanence. A clear-cut enumeration of the doctrine of Anekāntavāda as covering these and similar phenomena of 'copresence of the opposites' is the real contribution of Aptamīmāmsā; that the text proceeds within the over-all framework of the Saptabhangi doctrine is but a question of form. Here we close our summary perusal of the texts composed in the first stage of the age of Logic. All these texts bear, in one way or another, the stamp of being a product of an age of transition. Sanmati, Višeşāvašyakabhāsya and the writings of Kundakunda are so much permeated with the spirit of the age of Agamas that it will be advisable to characterise them as semi-Agamic texts. It is only insofar as these texts develop the doctrine J. O...13 Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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