Reals on the Jaina Metaphysics

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Shatnidas Khetsy Charitable Trust Mumbai

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Introduction
One would not be justified from this in concluding that thereby we mean that the Jaina theory is a development later than the Mimānsā, or earlier than the Nyāya. Nothing is further from our business in these papers than fixing the chronology of Indian philosophical theories. In these lectures we mean simply to show how a particular Jaina theory can be looked upon as logically connected with another Indian philosophical theory. This is however not to say that either of the two theories is as a matter of fact historically developed from the other. The Cartesians asserted the independent existence of Soul and Matter and thereby created a gulf between them which, so far as they were concerned, was left unbridged. Centuries before Descartes, however, the Platonic school avoided the dualism by showing that matter in its essence was but non-being after all and that idea was the sole reality. The followers of Democritus, on the other hand, avoided the same dualism by fixing on matter-stuff as the only primal reality and explaining away mind as simply a product of material atoms. It is thus possible to arrange the Cartesian dualism, the Platonic idealism and the materialism of ancient Greece in a logically successive or progressive series, but this order is not chronological.
While stating the above we are not unmindful of the fact that a favourite mode now-a-days of studying a particular system of philosophy is by looking to its chronological position i.e. by taking into consideration the systems that preceded it as well as those that followed it. But while it is quite easy to arrange the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Bradley, in a logical order which is at the same time chronological, in the case of the Indian systems of philosophy such an arrangement seems to be impossible. For, every Indian system is a finished and self-complete system and presents its problems in juxta-position with the similar problems in other systems. The Vedāntic criticism of the Samkhya dualism is an essential part of the Vedānta;yet, what is Sāṁkhya, bereft of its criticism of the Vedāntic monism? How are we to determine in this case which is earlier, the Vedāntic monism or the Sāṁkhyandualism,