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Microcosmology : Atom MUTATION (PARIŅĀMA)
Non-absolutism being the foundation of Jain Philosophy, mutation (change) is as much real as permanence. A substance is a substratum of infinite qualities. Nothing can exist without being in some determinate way and the qualities of a substance means its existence in a determinate mode of being'. Thus, assert Jains, the qualities (gunas) and modes (par vā yas) cannot be absolutely different from the substance nor can they be absolutely identical with it.
Change or modification is a fundamental characteristic of all that is real. The problem presented by unccasing mutability of cxistence is one of the carliest as well as one of the most persistent ones in the whole range and history cf Eastern as well as Western Philosophy. There is an ominous hint of the central paradox implied in all mutability -- namely, that only the identical and permanent can change.
This paradoxical thought has affected philosophy in different ways at different periods of its history. In the West, at the very dawn of Greek Philosophy, it was the guiding principle of the "Ionian physicists." Later on, Parmenides and his Eleatic successors swung to the extreme view that change, being impossible in a permanent homogeneous substance, must be a mcre illusion of our deceptive scnses.
Later again, Empedocles sought to reconcile the apparent mutability of things with the criticism of Parmenides by the theory of regrouping of atom in space.
At a more developed stage of Greek thought, Plato drew the momentous distinction between two worlds or orders of being - the real with its etcrnal unvarying self-identity, and the merely apparent, where all is change, confusion, and instability. In the Orient also, there have not been wanting attempts to get rid of the paradox by denying its truth. Vedāntists, like the Eleatics, sought to escape it by reducing change itself to a basless illusion. On the other hand, Buddhists (fluxists), like the disciples of Heraclitus, have evaded it by refusing to admit any permanent identity in the changeable, and they have not been entirely without imitators in the modern world.
