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Jaina Theory of Multiple Facets of Reality and Truth
By adding a category of anirvacanīya to the twin-categories of sat and asat, the Advaita Vedāntins raised the number of planks in the epistemological frame to three. Three things must be noted here with regard to this three-plank frame of Vedānta. First, the germs of the anirvacanīya or anirvācya category are there in the ægveda mantra cited presently, since it speaks of the existence of tamas when sat and asat were non-existent, which naturally implies that tamas has an existence, apart from sat and asat. Secondly, this anirvacanīya (or anirvācya, as it is also called sometimes) category found its due place in the sevenplank frame of the Jainas also, with a slightly modified name. Instead of calling it anirvacanīya, they called it avaktavya, that is all. Grammatically speaking, anirvacanīya or anirvācya, and avaktavya are more or less the same, with no denotational difference at all; the only superficial difference being that the upasarga nir' is dropped in the latter and the suffix 'tavya 'has taken the place of its counterpart'aniyar' or yat'. Thirdly, the Mādhyamika Buddhists also did include this anirvacanīya in their fourfold epistemological frame by what they described as 'anubhaya tattva', that is, a category, which belonged to neither of the earlier-known categories of sat and asat. The parallelism of this anubhaya' category, as it is usually designated by the Buddhists and the anirvacanīya of Advaita Vedāntins is complete, since the term anirvacanīya of the Vedāntins is only a sort of abbreviation--adopted for convenience and brevity—of “sad-asadbhyām anirvacanīya" or "sadasad-vilakṣaṇa”, which is nothing but another and more explicit way of describing the Buddhist term 'anubhaya'. What is implicitin anubhaya' is made explicit in 'sad-asad-vilaksana'; that is all.
Unlike the Vedāntins, the Madhyamika Buddhists had no difficulty in positing satand asat in the same thing, at the same time-a position, vehemently opposed by Sankarācārya on the ground that the two conflicting attributes of existence and non-existence can never co-exist anywhere, at anytime, in anything. The Buddhists, therefore, recognised sad-asat as a separate category, thereby building up a four-plank frame for their epistemological theory. Thus, sat, asat, sad-asat and neithersat-nor-asat constitute the four planks of their well known four-pronged (catuskoti) epistemological wheel. Here again, it must be observed that all these four planks have been bodily adopted by the Jainas for their
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