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JAINA ONTOLOGY
Samantabhadra had clinched the most crucial point that the Jainas of this age had to elaborate, viz. the all-out importance of Anekāntavāda as the central criterion for evaluating the contemporary non-Jaina philoso systems. He had also offered valuable hints as to the lines on which the systems like Buddhist, Sankhya, Nyāya-Vaišeșika had to be assailed. But he heardly went beyond offering mere hints. Akalanka continued what Samantabhadra had begun and so he was in a position to enter into a larger number of details than was the case with the latter. But even Akalanka had his limitations. Moreover, he devoted a good part of his energy to formulating the Jaina doctrine of pramānas, a doctrine that was to fill up a glaring lacuna vitiating the Jaina thought-world. The result was that even Akalanka's was not an all-round battle against possible rivals. The credit for waging such a battle goes to Vidyānanda who had thoroughly mastered both the contemporary systems of philosophy and the legacy left by Akalanka. Certainly, in some sense Vidyānanda's Tattvārthaslokavārtika and Astasa. hasri represent the biggest achievement of the Jaina camp in the field of philosophical speculation. But the precise meaning of this statement has to be grasped.
Since long were the Jaina theoreticians comparing and contrasting their own ideological convictions with those of their rivals, but in the beginning the task must have proved pretty uphill, For the entire body of Jaina tenets was couched in a technical terminology that was almost untranslatable into one that would be comprehensive to others. It was in Umāsvāti's Tattvārthasūtra that the problems were for the first time so posed that a comparison of the Jaina solution of them with its non-Jaina counterparts became somewhat easy. But even Umāsvāti can be said to have taken only first steps in this connection. For neither Tattvārthasūtra nor even Umā. svāti's Bhāşya on it ever enters into a comparison of the Jaina and nonJaina views. Of course, there seems to have been another tradition which was more thoroughgoing in this matter and which stood culminated in Mallavādi's Nayacakra, but for some reason or other Mallavādi's example could not be followed by his successors and his performance remained something of the nature of an isolated adventure. But it was not entirely so. For the Jainas of the period somehow grew convinced that Anekantavāda was to be their central philosophical tenet and this conviction came out in bolder relief in Mallavadi than in Umāsvāti. Samantabhadra was the real spiritual heir of Mallavadi even if he worked on a nuch less ambitious scale than the latter. For Samantabhadra busied himself with a basic evaluation of the most important of the contemporary philosophical systems and this was something essentially in the fashion of Mallavādi. But Samantabhadra was much more thorough-going than Mallavādi so far as viewing things from an anekatanvadı standpoint was concerned. These two facts taken
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