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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
moment and at the same time continues. The continuity never breaks down. The Vaišeṣika maintains that when things perish, they irrevocably disappear from the world. But the Jaina in agreement with the Sankhya maintains that cessation is not absolute. If absolute cessation of the cause were the indispensable condition of the emergence of the effect, the mutual dependence of cause and effect would not be intelligible. The cause would not be of service to the effect, if it were defunct at the time the effect emerges into being. In other words, the cause would not be cause of the effect and the effect would not be affiliated to the cause. The cause continues while it is changed into the effect. The cause is independent of the auxiliaries so far as its natural change is concerned. Because the cause is dynamic and changing by its very nature it is self-sufficient with reference to its constitutional change. The modes are transitory by their nature. Change means the emergence of modes which were not in evidence before. And unless the modes per se are perishable, there would not be new modes and consequently no change. The services of external causes are not superfluous, as they are responsible for the speciality of the modes. What is maintained is that things are dynamic by their nature and so their changefulness is spontaneous. But that the change should assume this or that shape depends upon the presence of other factors which are in operation.
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The Jaina has no hesitation in accepting the Sauträntika's position of causal efficiency as the criterion of reality. Being dynamic in constitution every real is the cause of its own change. We have seen that change is inexplicable if an absolutist standpoint is adopted. Vedanta is obliged to declare it to be an appearance. The fluxist who swears by change ultimately ends in denying it in effect. In the philosophy of flux each entity exists for a moment and perishes at the next moment in toto. So there is no change in any existent. It has a definite assignable place in the time-continuum, but it is there unchanged and unmodified. Change implies that the thing should become different from what it is. This is possible if an entity persists at any rate for more than a moment. It comes into being and it is what it is at the moment of its origin. It could change only if it were vested with a novel attribute at the next moment. But if it had no continuity
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