________________
CHAPTER XI
365
"refreshingly modern” and as "a happy blend of naturalistic and spiritualistic, realistic and idealistic tendencies”, observes: “Just the philosophy' is perhaps what many contemporary philosophers would say. But on close scrutiny, it fails to satisfy some of the deepest metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind. Its fascination is the fascination of an eclecticism-a philosophy of compromise." This is said to be "the central defect” arising from the relativism of syādvāda.
The second criticism of syādvāda, made by Hiriyanna, is that it (syädvāda) is “variety of scepticism". "Prejudice against absolutism", the reason imputed by Hiriyanna for such "scepticism", is even more conclusively advanced by Radhakrishnan, who, after mentioning “the strong points of the theory of knowledge of the Jainās and defending it against the attacks of the Vedantins” remarks : "Yet in our opinion the Jaina logic leads to a monistic idealism (by which he means 'the hypothesis of the absolute') and so far as the Jainas shrink from it they are untrue to their own logic."
After casually complementing syādvāda as the “most searching dialectic" Belvalkar gives such a twist to his statement of syödväda that it is made to sound like scepticism,
1. "Anekāntavāda or The Jaina Philosophy of Relativity”,
G. Hanumantha Rao, The Half-yearly Journal of the Mysore
University, March, 1942, p. 79. 2. Ibid., p. 87 f. 3. IP, Vol. I, p. 305. 4. "The Undercurrents of Jainism” (an article in the Indian Philo
sophical Review, Vol. I, No. 1, 1917, edited by A. C. Widgery and R. D. Ranade, Bombay), p. 33.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
