Jaina Political Thought

Author(s): G C Pandey
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

Page 22

constraints, and on the other, of an inevitable sense of imponderable ideals. The former tends to produce sciences offering causaldescriptions,thelatter systems of moral prescriptions. As a result political thought tends to have a twofold aspect, causal-scientific as well as ethical. While traditional and modern views differ sharply on the way these two are related and on the nature, source and significance of the moral order in politics, they tend to meet naturally when they deal with empirical aspects of political life in so far as they have similar facts before them. Their sharp moral contrast tends to be blurred when they approach purely empirical problemsexcept of course, for historical differences. That is why although traditional and modern attitudes differ sharply as world-views, it is still possible to see in ancient sciences a stage in the development of modern sciences. In other words, 'traditional and modern world views are rooted in a pair of perennially coexisting attitudes, though they have become alternately dominant in historical epochs. That is why faith and scepticism, religion and science, social ethics and amoral politics, have belonged to all ages but in vastly different proportions and forms. In past ages positive science had to present itself as a religious tradition, now religion has to claim to be a science in order to be respectable. Thus Ayurveda and Jyotisa superadd a traditional origin to their basic empiricism. On the other hand, Vivekanand and Aurobindo have sought to formulate the science of Yoga
An important methodological principle follows from this. In dealing with traditional thought we should not think of it simply as the earlier stage of a linear scheme of historical evolution. It would not do to regard modern thought as presenting the standard form with reference to which the contribution and deficiency of earlier thought have to be judged. In other words, we must give up the method of presenting traditional thought as a mere history within a single and absolute chronological order. No doubt tradition has a history in the sense that it is manifested in generation and in this process undergoes inevitable change.
It is also true that its pristine and authentic 'form can not be fully understood without the application of historical criticism to ancient texts. At the same time, tradition must be recognised to be a symbolically expressed system of knowledge and wisdom which is really preserved authentically only within a living social tradition which practises and contemplates it, and which has a perennial and universal value independent of its history.
Jaina political thought, thus, needs to be examined as a specific version of traditional thought which itself seeks to express universal and timeless principles given in moral and spiritual experience, especially in its heightened form available to seers and sages. These principles constitute