Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

Page 195

174 Jain Philosophy in Historical Outline of existence. Each unit of effect is different from any other such unit, but a succession of the different units of effect reveals a succession of new substances every moment, and that is why all things are momentary. The Jains refute this view on the following grounds: We can only assert that thing the existence of which is indicated by a corresponding experience. The Buddhist view that each unit of effect produced is not exactly the same at each new point of time and that therefore all things are momentary is fallacious, because experience shows that not all of an object is found to be changing every moment. To take an example, gold in a gold ornament is found to remain permanent while its forms like ear-rings or bangles are seen to undergo change. In the face of such an experience it is impossible to assert that the whole thing vanishes every moment and that new things are being renewed at each succeeding moment. According to the Jains, this baseless analysis has given birth to the curious arthakriyākäritva doctrine of Buddhists leading them to unfounded nihilism. Thus if we go by experience we can neither reject the self nor the external world. The rise of knowledge through experience can be parallel to certain objective collocation of things.
The Buddhists began with a sense of realism, but the two schools of Mahāyāna, viz. Sūnyavāda and Vijñānavāda, shifted themselves to absolute idealism which considered the empirical world as completely unreal, as false as the beauty of the daughter of a barren woman. In course of its philosophical history, Jainism also developed some idealistic tendencies, but the realistic nature of Jain standpoint remained unaltered in essence. It rejects Sunyavāda and Vijñānavāda because they do not accept the competence of the sense organs. The Buddhist theory of dependent origination conceives in its own distinctive manner the series of qualities and attributes that originate or perish, but it posits no permanent atomic substance in the form of the substrata of these qualities and attributes. But Jainism posits over and above the perceptible world an infinite number of two utterly distinct types of subtle elements, one physical and the other conscious. The gross world is according to it only the effect (kārya) or modification (pariņāma) of the subtle physical elements.
Of the problems of knowledge in general, the Jains are in agreement with the Buddhists belonging to the Vijñānavāda school on the point of the self-revelatory character of cognition, but while the Vijñānavādins hold that there exist no objects apart from cognition, and a particular piece of cognition is possessed of a particular form, the