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JAINA ONTOLOGY
of darsana. Here Siddhasena also explains how the avadhi and kevala types of cognition belong to the former group, the manaḥparyaya and śruta types of cognition the latter groups. All this envolves a radical departure from traditional views and is also interesting, but since it has little ontological bearing we take leave of it.
(B) MALLAVĀDĪ
(1) General Evaluation of the non-Jain Philosophical views
Mallavadi's Nayacakra is an important text, not only for the students of Jaina philosophy but also for those of Indian philosophy in general. For even if a convinced Jaina Mallavadi was an extremely thorough student of contemporary systems of Indian philosophy, a qualification few Jaina authors before and after him exhibit in as good a measure as he does. Unfortunately however his text has not come down to us in its original form and what we have to content ourselves with is a restoration made from the commentary of one Simhasuri, who, of couse, seems to have known his task fairly well. Not much time perhaps elapsed between Mallavādi and Simhasuri, for just like the former the latter too is well acquainted with Dinnaga but has heard of no Dharmakirti; (in the case of Simhasuri silence about Dharmakirti can possibly be due to the fact that he was commenting on a per-Dharmakirti text but the probability rather is that he himself came before Dharmakirti ). Even then the difference between Mallavādī's own text and this text as restored from Simhasuri's commentary is obvious. However, our text is so unique that even a not completely satisfactory restoration of it ought to be a veritable boon to the students of Indian philosophy. And the following is wherein lies its uniqueness.
Nayacakra is written in the form of a marathon debate taking place between some seventeen disputants where the incoming one criticises the outgoing one before presenting his own case. Among themselves these disputants exhaust almost all the most representative systems that dominated the contemporary philosophical scene. And the style of the text is throughout advanced scholarly. All this goes to make Nayacakra a wothy predecessor of Sarvadarsanasangraha, to be precise, a 5th- 6th century A. D. version of Sarvadarsanasangraha, which is doubtless more scholarly than Sarvadarsanasńgraha and, unlike it, is dovoted to both an exposition and criticism of the philosophical systems under consideration. Then let us add to it the circumstance that the 5th-6th centuries A.D. are the period from which not very many philosophical texts have come down to us so that Nayacakra representation of a system can well be treated as a brief but solid cotemporary text devoted to this system. Thus in view of the all-out inportance of Mallavadi's performance it will be advisable for us to look at the contents of Nayacakra, briefly and chapterwise; (in order to give a concrete idea of
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