New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

Author(s): Mahaprajna Acharya, Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Today and Tommorrow Printers and Publishers

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Jaina Logic of Philosophical Period
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philosophy of monism being only an irrelevant doctrine. We thus find two antipodal summits-the summit of monism and the summit of pluralism. The Jaina philosophers, however, did not accept any of these extremes. They struck a balance and a wholesome synthesis between the universal and the particular, the one and the many. And they declared that a particular without the universal or one without many and vice versu are false. The substance is the universal and the modes are the particulars. Modes without substance or substance without modes are never the objects of experience.
Question 3. Different philosophies have postulated different number of fundamental principles. Is it possible to effect a synthesis among them?
Answer. The fundamental principles are only two-the sentient and the insentient. All other principles are their modes. The number of the fundamental principles is developed on the basis of particular necessities or perspectives. Irrespective of these necessities and perspectives all those principles are reduced to only two. Thus the twenty-five principles of the Samkhya philosophy are reduced to two, viz. purusa and prakrti; the five skandhas of Buddhism are reduced to two, viz. nāma and rupa and so on.
Question 4. Is the pramana also relative in its application? If that is so, would not the concept of pramana lose its propriety and lapse into an improper concept?
Answer. There is pramāna because there is prameya (object of pramāna). Had there been no prameya, the pramana would have been an irrelevant concept. The pramāna is relative to prameya and consequently it is relevant to the pramātā (the knower) also. Such relativity does not create a predicament of uncertainty and doubt. On the contrary it successfully explains the real rooted in the firm base of determinative experience. Isolated from the knower (pramātā) and the known (prameya) and independent of them, the pramāna is bound to lose its raison d'être. A sensory perception is pramāņa (valid source of knowledge) in the perspective of sensory epistemology, but with reference to the extra-sensory perception it is invalid. This position can also be reversed without any impropriety and it is possible to say that the extra-sensory perception is a valid mode of cognition in the epistemology of direct perception. But it has no relevance in the field of mati and śruta which can cognise only indirectly through appropriate media. The problem of pramūna can be satisfactorily explained only in the background of relativity. From the verbal standpoint (sabda-naya) no line of