New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

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

Page 49

Axioms of Non-absolutism
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also cannot be false. The characteristic features of a real are origination, cessation and persistence. Whatever is causally efficient does necessarily arise, cease to exist and also continue. To say that the sensuous world is true and the self is untrue can be possible only in ordinary parlour, but it can never be a language expressive of the truth that is deep and unfathomable. On the other hand, to say that the self alone is the ultimate truth while the sensuous world is unadulterated falsehood, can be the language of the spiritual world, but it can never be true of the world as it is. The saints and philosophers cannot express themselves in identical linguistic tools. In spiritual idiom the sensuous objects are momentary and evanescent. Such idiom could inspire detachment and renunciation, but would miserably fail as a device of logical investigation of the nature of truth. Logic does not distinguish between the reality of the sensuous object and the reality of the self. The material atoms are as real as the spiritual self in the eyes of the rationalist. All that originates, vanishes and persists is real. This triple criterion of truth is as validly applicable to the material atom as to the spiritual self. When the spiritual values become identical with the world outside, the doctrine of impermanence turns to be a controversia issue. Otherwise that is a very valuable doctrine. All the spiritual thinkers, without any exception, have endorsed it. The Jainas also have assigned adequate importance to it. Among the twelve contemplations, impermanence occupies the first position. The practitioner of such contemplation repeats within himself the formula-everything is impermanent. But that belongs to the sphere of spirituality. As soon as one switches to rational thinking, it is the definite view of the Jaina philosophers that the discrepancy between the impermanence of the material and the permanence of the spiritual becomes untenable. To the reasoning mind the permanence and the impermanence are equally shared by the spiritual and the material world. A clear line of demarcation can never be drawn between permanence and impermanence. By the admission of such distinction the Samkhya system had to assign both bondage and emancipation to Prakrti (the primordial matter) instead of Puruşa of whom the two were only metaphorically admissible. The Purusa is eternally free and pure. The admission of bondage and emancipation would make the latter amenable to change and impermanence, a position which could not be acceptable to the Sāmkhya system.
Among the Jainas Acarya Kundakunda has also asserted, like the Samkhya, that the Jiva (the soul) is not the agent of karma. The