________________
BANERJEE : ANEKĀNTAVĀDA AND LANGUAGE
129
Mahāprajña who in his book Anekānta in Hindi (translated into English by Mrs Sudhamahi Regunathan by the name of Anekānta, the third Eye) has said that our life is based on opposing pairs. The English translation says
"Anekanta has one rule: co-existence of opposites. Not only is existence in pairs, they have to be opposing pairs. In the entire world of nature, in the entire universe of existence, opposing pairs exist. If there is wisdom there is ignorance. If there is vision, there is lack of it. If there is happiness then there is sadness too. If there is loss of consciousness, there is awakening. If there is death, there is life. There is the auspicious and the inauspicious. High and low. The disturbed and the undisturbed. There is gaining of strength and the loss of it." (pp. 4-5)
II Language
Having thus described the fundamental basic conception of anekānta which really emphasises the manysidedness of truth, or to put it in a different way, looking at a substance (dravya) from its positive and negative aspects, I now pass on to apply the doctrine of Anekānta to the epistemological problem of language which consists of sentences and their meanings..
Various schools of Indian philosophy, the Sanskrit grammarians and rhetoricians have devoted much time to the linguistic problem of meaning. In order to ascertain the meaning of word(s) in a sentence, they have speculated various semantic aspects of language. The rhetoricians have defined a sentence thus:vākyaṁ syād yogyatā' kāřkşā' satti-yuktaḥ padoccayaḥ
(SD. II. I) "A sentence is a collection of words (padoccayaḥ) possessing (yuktaḥ) compatibility (yogyatā), expectancy (ākāňkşā) and juxta-position or proximity (āsatti)".
"Compatibility (yogyatā) means the absence of absurdity in the mutual relation of the things denoted by
