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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
to be in the wrong. He is disloyal to experience and to logic alike, as experience shows the persistence of things and logic proves that change, which is also the premise from which the fluxist starts, is impossible without persistence. The Vedāntist accepts the continuity of things and dismisses change. The Buddhist accepts change without continuity, though experience, unsophisticated by considerations of pure logic, attests both to be actual. The Jaina accepts both continuity and change on the evidence of experience and maintains that there is no logical contradiction between them. The Vedāntist is consistent in that he does not abandon pure logic. Pure logic demands that a real is real for all time, and as change connotes the emergence of a novel attribute, which was not in existence before at least in its present form, the Vedāntist discards change as contradictory to the inherent reality of a thing. The Vedāntist is loyal to logic, though he is disloyal to experience, which he asserts to be illusory. The fluxist accepts change as the very essence of reality in adherence to the verdict of experience. He is not deterred by the considerations of pure logic that a real is real for all time and in its own right and so cannot be unreal. Had he been loyal to pure logic, he ought to have held that things were imperishable and were real for all time and in their own right. He discarded logic and accepted experience as the authority. But in the course of his development of his philosophy he allowed himself to be swayed by considerations of pure logic. He argued that as change was contradictorily opposed to not change, not change was unreal. The fluxist here proves disloyal to experience in deference to pure logic. The result has been that he has not been loyal either to pure logic or to experience and in this his philosophy is less satisfactory than Vedanta.
The position that is adopted by the Jaina is this: Pure logic, prior to and independent of experience, is a blind guide to the determination of truth. Logic is to rationalize and systematize what experience offers. All our knowledge is ultimately derived from experience. Even lhe knowledge that something exists is not capable of being derived from any other source. The existence and behavior of things and their mutual relationship can be ascertained only on the basis of experience and the function of reason or pure logic is only to reduce the data of experience to order
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