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

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Page 111
________________ 98 JAINA ONTOLOGY of ut pāda, vyaya, dhrauvya or that of nayas - particularly, the dravyāstika and paryāyāstika that they say something appropriate to the age of Logic, For these doctrines have laid the foundations of Anekāntavāda --- which certainly is a characteristic feature of the age of Logic. In the case of Naya. cakra difficulties arise from another direction. Its mastery of the contemporary non-Jaina systems of philosophy leaves little to be desired, dut the text is no model for a criticisin of these systems undertaken from the Jaina standpoint. As a matter of fact, the text does not even claim that the systems in question have been criticised from the Jaina standpoint, for what has been presented is the criticism of an outgoing system on the part of the incoming one. Really, however, the criticism part of the text almost always contains, in an anomalous fashion, something or else which a Jaina alone could say while the rest of this part contains little to which a Jaina could take exception. But the fact remains that the criticism of the systems in question would have been somewhat different had it been offered in the name of a Jaina himself. As for Aptamīmāṁsā it gives no evidence of its author being so thorough a student of the contemporary systems of philosophy as was the author of Nayacakra, but the framework worked out here for criticising these systems proved to be a major helpful model for subsequent authors. Certainly, the task of the Jaina authors belonging to the second stage of the age of Logic was to command a Nayacakra-like mastery over the contemporary systems of philosophy and subject them to criticism mainly in terms of the model provided by Aptamīmāṁsā (partly also in an independent manner). In the Svetāmbara camp the task was undertaken by Haribhadra in his Anekāntajayapatākā, in the Digam camp by Akalanka and Vidyananda in their several masterpieces. So it is to these authors that we turn next. Haribhadra was a polymath whose intellectual endeavour compassed an unusually large number of fields but Anekānta jayapataka was doubtless his philosophical magnum opus. The text did not receive due attention on the part of later generations (even Yašovijaya chose to write a commentary not on it but on Šāstravārtāsamuccaya which was a comparatively elementary philosophical text coming from the pen of Haribhadra). But the fault lay not so much with Anekāntajayapatākā as with theo ver-all situation that emerged historically and the question deserves a close consideration. As compared to Aptamīmāṁsā Anekantajayapatākā is a much advanced text and for the most part while arranging its material it adopts the former's model minus its essential trappings. Thus in its first four chapters it respectively deals with the following pairs of contradictory features : (1) Existence-Non-existence (2) Permanence-Transience (3) Genaral-Particular (4) Describable-Indescribable Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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