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Jainism As Metaphilosophy
The common core, in terms of the lechnical details delineated by Anekāntavāda, incorporates within itself, the attempts of different inquiring minds at unraveling the complex characteristic of Reality. In our review of the meta-philosophical significance of the doctrine of Anekānta, it has already been indicaid that the idea of complexity of Reality which is only implicitly evident from the fact of many (aneka) thcories being availablc, is cxplicated by considering the idea of manifoldness (anekānta).
It remains here to reiterate that some of the seminal metaphysical problems (like the Doctrine of Substance and Attribute, Universals and Particulars) which come to be considered for substantiating the idea of manifoldness, are not peculiar either lo Jainism or to Indian philosophy in general, but arc important oncs in the history of western philosophy as well. The divergent vicwpoints taken on these issues during the centuries of philosphising in the West—starting from the pre-Socratic era and continuing uplo present times—would also show that the same problem (of understanding Rcality) has been analysed differently by different schools and that they togсther point to the common core of concern, the manifold aspects of the problem under investigation. In this way the idea of perspectives comes to the forc. A slight digression here to refer to a parallel idea in Bertrand Russell's thought would be quite appropriate for considering thc dccpcr significance of the Jaina view of Anekānta.
To explain his theory that the physical object perceived (and thence also the external world in general) is a logical construction, Russell proposes his theory of sense data. His argument in brief is this. Since different sets of sense data are presented to different people, different perceptions of objecis result and, correspondingly, different pictures of the external world emerge. The differences are allributable to at least two factors: onc, different minds being associated with different bodies; and two, the different places from which the objects are looked at. In regard to the first, it should be noted that owing to the varicd types of association of minds and bodics, cach mind apprchcnds the world from a standpoint peculiar to itself. In regard to the second, it should be stated that the existence of a number of worlds corresponding to the differences between places from which the world is looked at, has to be accepted. Thus an infinite number of worlds corresponding to the infinite number of minds at work and the infinite number of places from which a view is had, can
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