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The Dialectic of Sevenfold Predication
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insists that the fallacy of these philosophical positions lies in their exclusiveness and extremism. These philosophers taught true doctrines, but they erred by insisting on their discoveries being the exclusive nature of reality. The Jaina profits by their speculations and in his comprehensive philosophy finds room for: them all. Each taken by itself is a true evaluation, but inadequate. He charges the philosophers with inadequacy and extremistic outlook, which, he thinks, is due to their preoccupation with their findings and impatience to look at the other side of the shield. The Jaina makes the extremes meet in his system of thought and calls his own philosophy by the name of nonextremism and non-absolutism (anekāntavāda). The non-absolutism of the Jaina is not the result of negation of absolutes and extremes, but of comprehension of them in a system. The empirical reality of the Vedāntist called vyāvahārikasattā is the absolute truth of the Jaina, and the latter refuses to accompany the Vedāntist in his philosophical excursion into the transcendental plane, which the Jaina thinks to be an airy abstraction hypostatized, as it lacks the sanction of experience, which is the only proof of existence.
The theory of sevenfold predication may be regarded as a logical elaboration of the position of the Jaina that each position is concomitant with its negation, or which is the same thing, that position is inconceivable without negation. This logical theory is in its turn derived from Jaina ontology that reality is determinate. We have shown that determinate reality is the focal point in which being and non-being coincide. Absolutism consists in maintaining either being or non-being as absolute truth and in holding that one is in absolute opposition to the other. The Vedāntist and the Sünyavādin are paragons of absolutism. The former holds being, absolute and undetermined by non-being, as the whole truth, whereas the Buddhist nihilist accepts non-being as the only truth. The Jaina is non-absolutist in that he accepts both as the true determinations of the real, which is unique and common, particular and universal, positive and negative, rolled into one. But is this non-absolutism absolute and universal ? The proof of non-absolutism is the sevenfold predication. Does the sevenfold predication apply to non-absolutism itself ? If it does apply, non-absolutism will be concomi
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