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LXXXVIII
PRAVACANASARA,
their superiority. Turning to Jaina literature, Mahāvīra is uniformly mentioned as Samane bhagavam Mahāvīre by the Jaina texts; Pravacunasāra throughout uses the word S'ramaņa for a monk, and this sense is quite usual in the S'vetămbara canon; and in South Indian vernaculars like Kannada Sramana or Stravaya necessarily means a Jaina. The presence of the word 'recluse' in the context therefore, does not allow the conclusion of the non-Jaina origin. The Buddhist passage indicates that it is a perverted view of the Jaina doctrine; something similar to it might have been upheld by Brāhmaya ascetics as well. Brahmajālasutta mentions a view called Antānantikā, which at least in its name appears to be very near Anekānta, and against that the Buddhists propounded the fourfold process or method of exposition (catuskotikah : hoti, na hoti, hoti ca na hoti ca, n'eva hoti na na hotz). Even in Jaina texts we do find this fourfold method of exposition in different contexts; for instance, a statement can be true, false, both true and false, or neither true nor false. All these parallels merely point out to a method of exposition which must have been current in Magadha perhaps even before Mahāvīra and Buddha. Some scholars hold that Syādvāda comes out as a compromise between certain contradictory utterances of Upanişads that Being alone was true, that non-being alone was all true, neither being nor non-being is the truth, reality must be characterised by neither or both. This opinion perhaps takes it for granted that all the Upanişads are a uniform stratum of literature which is never influenced by the philosophical speculations of the land in which they came to be shaped. It is just possible that various views held by different philosophers, not necessarily Vedic, must have influenced the Upanişadic thought as well.
VEDANTIC BEGINNING FOR SYĀDVĀDA NOT TENABLE.-Prof. A. B. Dhruva suggests that the Anirvacanīyatā-vāda of Vedānta has led to the Syādvāda of the Jainas as the next positive step. This deduction is based on the supposition that Syādvāda had non-Jaina beginnings as proposed by himself on account of its being attributed to 'recluses and Brāhmaṇas'. The deduction is fallacious, because, as shown above, the term recluse, a s'ramaụa, preeminently_means.a-Jaina. Anirvacanīyatā means that Māyā is such a principle that it can neither be called a being nor a non-being, nor both, and hence it is anirvacanīya, Māyā cannot be predicated in terms of being or non-being; in short it is a negative description, if at all I can call it so, of Māyā. It should be distinguished from the conditional statements of Syādvāda. It is true that there is some similarity between ayaktavya proposition of Syādyāda and anirvacanīyatā of Vedānta, but the underlying idea is different; in the former
1 Dutt: Early Buddhist Afonachism pp. 64 and 69. 2 A traditional definition, perhaps of sufficient antiquity is preserved in Abhayadeva's
commentary on Pras'navyöharanănga, and it runs thus: niggamtha-sakha-tävasa-geruya.
ājīva pamcahä samanā / Possibly it means a Magadhan recluse in general, 3 Indian H. Quarterly VIII, p. 721. 4. Dasaveyūliyasutta chap. 7; also Ācāränga and other Texts. 5. Samkhyapravacanasūtra V, 54, especially the bhāşya of Vijñānabhikṣu; see Dasgupta:
History of Indian Philosophy Vol. I, pp. 461, 487.
