Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

Page 16

Preface XV
"Its basic attitude of non-absolutism (anekāntavāda) notwithstanding, the Jaina standpoint is absolutely realistic (ekāntataḥ văstavavădin) in nature. For according to it too, the objective truth (bhāva satyatva) revealed through sense-perception (technically called matijñāna) etc. is on a par with that revealed through transcendental intuition (technically called kevala-jñāna), that is to say, the two types of truth may differ as to their quantity but not as to their quality and nature. Sense-perception, etc. reveal a few substances (dravya) and a limited number of their modes (paryāya) while transcendental intuition reveals the totality of substances and the totality of their modes, but the two do so in precisely the same manner and with precisely the same sort of validity. Thus even though the Jaina system grants that certain extremely subtle objects (sūkṣmatama bhāva) are incapable of description (anirvacanīya) it insists that the objects capable of description (nirvacanīya) are nevertheless real. This however is not the case with Śūnyavāda, Samkarite Vedānta, etc. (ASILM, 1-2)."
Although the realistic nature of the Jain standpoint has remained unaltered in essence, the idealistic accretions which it eventually developed, like other systems, as is revealed by the observation of Pandit Sukhlalji, which I have just quoted, remains to be explained. Jainism is basically an ethical religion which elaborates a moral code of behaviour showing what is worth striving for, what is good, what gives meaning to life. Early Jain metaphysicians wanted to find the common origin of the diverse phenomena of nature, in nature itself. Hence their approach was naturally materialistic. They did not run in the mad quest of a God for explaining the mysteries of life an universe. They depended on logic and reason. Their contribution to the growth of physical, chemical, astronomical and biological sciences was immense. But just as in Greece, after Aristotle, the term metaphysics lost its original meaning, and its subject matter came to be identified with speculative philosophy as against the pre-Socratic naturalism of the Ionian physicists, so also most of the Indian systems, when they received a good deal of sophistication in the hands of educated elite class, viz. the Brāhmaṇas, set to themselves the impossible task of prying into the transcendental being above and behind the physical universe, of explaining the concrete realities of existence in the light of a hypothetical absolute. It was not the way to truth, but to dream: not to knowledge, but to illusion. One should not fail to notice in this connection that although Buddhism and Jainism, in the earlier stages of their growth, rejected Brahmanical