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Numerical Difference and Absolute Non-Existence
as comprising three determinations, viz., past, present and future. A real persists through time and thus has these three temporal determinations. That a real embraces the three time-determinations is again a necessary deduction from its possession of causal efficiency, which is the criterion of existence according to the fluxist. The Jaina endorses the Buddhist affirmation of causal efficiency as the criterion of existence. But whereas the Buddhist deduces from this premise the conclusion that everything is momentary, the Jaina affirms that things, because of their causal efficiency, must have the three temporal determinations. Causal efficiency is not predicable of a momentary in the same way as it is not competent to an unchanging unity. If a real were not amenable to change, it would not be the cause of an effect, as we have seen that the concepts of eternal cause and eternal effect are self-contradictory.1 Exercise of causal efficiency is possible in time and is thus possible in that which is temporal. An unchanging eternal has no temporal character and so cannot be a cause. The momentary has been found to be equally unchanging and so cannot have causal efficiency.2 Causal efficiency presupposes change and change presupposes persistence through time-divisions. So a real, which is dynamic by its nature, must have a history, that is to say, it must have a past and a future in addition to its being present. The Jaina, in agreement with the Sankhya, holds that a non-entity cannot become an entity and vice versa. Such being the case a real is real for all time. It was real in the past, is real in the present and will be real in future. A 'real' which has no past and no future is a fiction and a non-entity. It is obvious that it was not an entity before and will cease to be an entity after. But if a thing must be real in its own right, it cannot be unreal at any time. The fluxist fails to take note of this necessary truth when he denies past and future history of a real. The fluxist was misled by his dialectic that things must be perishable or not by their very constitution. He accepted that things were perishable on the evidence of experience, and discarded their continuation though it was equally attested by experience. The Jaina shows the fluxist
1. Vide Chapter II. 2. ibid.
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