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Jaina view of Life
intimately connected with life. It is to be lived. Mundaka Upanisad speaks of 'Brahma Vidya' as the basis of all knowledge.' Kautilya makes philosophy the lamp of all sciences. Philosophy has been called darsana in the sense of the spiritual perception and vision of the seers, and the highest triumphs of philosophy are possible only to those who have achieved in themselves a purity of the soul.8
Realization of the Atman is the highest end in Philosophy' there is no other way. In this sense, philosophy is darsana and intimately connected with life.
2. Philosophic enquiry has proceeded in two directions : i) The first uses a priori and deductive methods. It is analytic in approach and is the way of the rationalists. ii) The second adopts inductive methods and is the empiricist way. In ancient Indian thought, philosophic speculation relied on Sruti and Smrti.
The course of philosophy has been long and arduous. From Plato and the Upanisads to the present day, philosophers have sought to find solutions to the perennial problems of philosophy, and by pursuing the one way or the other have reached either the summits of speculation removed from human experience, or have ultimately faced the impossibility of metaphysical speculation.
i) We may first consider the a priori approach to the study of philosophy. In western thought, deductive and a priori methods were first used by Parmenides and his desciple Zeno, who made, for the first time, a distinction between sense and reason. The Philosophic speculations of Plato were largely based on a priori methods. He abstracted sense from reason and built a world of ideas independent of the physical world. In the
2. sarva-vidya-pratişṭhā.
3. Radhakrishnan (S): Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 45.
4. Bṛhadaranyaka II. IV-5 aima våre dṛṣṭavyaḥ.
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