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CHAPTER I
:
THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND OF JAINA
PHILOSOPHY
The Jaina Philosopher maintains that existents are possessed of an infinite number of attributes and characteristics which can be discovered by experience alone. Even the primal attribute of existence, which is the foundational element of the nature of an entity, is not capable of being ascertained by a priori logical considerations. Our knowledge of things and of their relations starts from experience, and reason can at best serve to organise the experienced data and build a system of thought, the elements of which together with their relations, must be ultimately derived from this fundamental source of knowledge, in other words, from direct acquaintance furnished by observation. The Jaina does not draw a line of distinction between internal and external sources of knowledge so far as their logical value is concerned. He refuses to put a premium on internal intuition. The mind, even with its active contributions, which the Jaina does not seek to deny, is believed by him to be an instrument of discovery and not a creator of facts. If we undertake to institute a comparison between the Jaina and Kant, a risky venture in all conscience, we may observe that the Jaina would have no difficulty in accepting the latter's finding that mind and matter both co-operate in producing knowledge. But the Jaina would not agree with Kant and for that matter with the Buddhist logicians, Dignåga and Dharmakirti, who anticipated many of the conclusions of the German Philosopher, that the categories, or forms of understanding, as he calls them, are but mental phenomena. Such concepts as causality, substance, attribute and the like, are no doubt the ways in which the mind works up the data of experience, but this does not mean with the Jaina that they are true of the mind only and not of the extra-mental reality which they purport to understand. The Jaina would take them to be the instruments of discovery of the nature of reality, internal and external, which render the same kind of service as the sepse-organs do.
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