Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

Page 224

A Comparative Study 203
effect of a Pramana, the Nyāya-Vaišeşikas and the Mīmāmsakas treat the effect of a Pramāṇa as absolutely distinct from it while the Buddhists treat the two as absolutely non-distinct. The Jains from their nonabsolutistic viewpoint treat a Pramāṇa and its effect as partly distinct and partly non-distinct. On the question whether or not memory is Pramāņa, the Jains consider it to be a Pramāṇa and classes it under non-perceptual category. All other schools of Indian thought do not consider memory to be a Pramāņa. The Nyāya-Vaiseșika and the Mīmāņsakas treat continuous cognition as Pramāna but they adopt two different lines of defence. The Buddhist do not lay much emphasis on this point. According to the Jain tradition, continuous cognition is a Pramāņa, but some of the Jain philosophers want to accept it in a restricted sense by taking into account specialities like moments, etc. As to the nature of recognition, the Buddhists hold it to be a combination of two pieces of cognition, namely memory and perception. Systems like Nyāya, Mímāmsā etc. maintain that, recognition is one single piece of congition of the nature of perception. Jain logicians disagree with both the tradition and regard recognition as but a variety of sense-perception.
Barring the Cārvākas, all of the philosophical schools, including Jainism, directly or indirectly, divide perception into two kinds, empirical and transcendental. According to the Buddhist logicians and the adherents of Advaita-Vedānta, transcendental perception is exclusively indeterminate, while according to the Nyāya-Vaišeşikas and Jains it is both determinate and indeterminate. According to the Nyāya-Vaisesika Sāmkhya-Yoga, Buddhist and Mīmāmsā systems the determinant of perception-ship is the fact of having been born of a contact (sannikarşa). More or less a similar view is shared by the Jains. The earlier Jain tradition attributes this contact to the soul while the later tradition attributes it to the sense organ and the manas. All advocates of indeterminate cognition hold that it has bare existence (sattāmātra) for its object. This existence in Buddhist tradition stands for the capacity to perform a function and can belong to momentary particular, in Vedānta for the indivisible ubiquitious Brāhman, and in Nyāya-Vaiseșika and Mimāmsā for mere being. In the SāmkhyaYoga and Jainism this existence is neither confirmed to a momentary particular nor is of the nature of Brahman. It is of the nature of origincum-distruction-cum-permanence (utpāda-vyayadhrauvya-svarūpa).
In view of what we have stated above it is now clear that no system of Indian philosophy allows any purely isolated treatment. The