Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

Author(s): Narendra Nath Bhattacharya
Publisher: Munshiram Manoharlal Publisher's Pvt Ltd New Delhi

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Jain Philosophy in Historical Outline
parts, whereas the atom has no parts. Thus being neither produced nor destructible the atoms of a thing are eternal.
This is a pure scientific approach, which was originally held by the Vaiseșika school, and that is why the corresponding development of the science of logic by the exponents of the earlier Nyāya school, came to its close. Science and logic should go side by side. This also explains why the supposed founders of these two schools, Gaūtama and Kaņāda, were indifferent to the question of God. It was their commentators-Vatsyāyana and Prasastapāda? — who were mainly responsible for introducing the concept of God. The cause of the admittance of God into a basically scientific and materialistic system requires some explanation. At least one of the reasons for the admission of God in the later version of the Nyāya-Vaišeșika was the purely technical need of defending an essentially scientific hypothesis, namely atomism. It is a fact that this atomic theory was formulated in the background of an underdeveloped science and technology. Its main weakness was the want of a satisfactory explanation of the process of atomic combination, by which the shaping of matter and consequently that of the physical world was believed to have been possible. How could the atoms being by definition partless, combine with each other? The Nyāya-Vaišeșikas had to face this question from the challenging Buddhists, Vedāntists and Mīmāmsakas. The real explanation of the fact of atomic combination presupposes a great deal of development in science and technology which was much beyond the scope of the knowledge of the ancient and medieval Indian philosophers. In default of such knowledge, the Nyāya-Vaiseşikas wanted to solve this problem evidently in terms of the technology known to them, the primitive technology of manual operation, of the potter producing the jar or weaver producing the cloth. In the Nyāya-Vaiseșika terminology, the potter or the weaver is the intelligent agent without whose operation there can be no production at all. In the image of this potter or craftsman, the Nyāya-Vaiseşikas conceived an intelligent agent, the God, to effect the first atomic combination. They argued that just as the potter produced the jar by combining two Kapālas, i.e. pre-fabricated parts of the jar, so did God produced the first dyad by combining two atoms. Thus was introduced God, the grand macrocosmic potter, into the atomic philosophy.
INSB, IV, 1.21. 2 VSB, pp. 48-49.