Reals on the Jaina Metaphysics

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

Page 94

Space
So,
Lastly the Jaina's urge that particles of odorous substances are not found to move even the tiniest of hairs at the nostrils; the argument that sound is an attribute and not a mode of matter because it does not move the subtle particles in its way, cannot be regarded as sound. In conclusion, Ratnaprabha points out that our perception does not tell us that Sound is an attribute of supersensuous substance, Ākāśa.
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THE THEORY OF SPACE IN SOME NON-JAINA SCHOOLS: JAINA
CRITICISM
Akāśa, according to the Jaina's, is thus not a matter-stuff. This view as shown above is obviously opposed to the theory of the Vedic schools of philosophers on the one hand, and to the contention of the early Pythagoreans whose "Unlimited" was at once infinite Space and infinite Stuff, thus identifying Space with primeval Matter. In this connection it is to be recalled that with the Jaina's, the principles of Motion and Rest, Dharma and Adharma are Reals. Space is generally determined by the movement of a thing from one point to another. It appears that in ancient India there was a class of thinkers who contended that motions and movements of bodies as well as their stoppages were accounted for by Akāśa. Kaņāda seems to point in 2.1.20 of the Vaiseṣika Sutra's to the position of such philosoophers:
"(They maintain) Ākāśa is proved by the movements, etc, of bodies."
The atomists in ancient Greece thought that the hypothesis of Space was necessary to explain Motion. With Berkeley pure Space was the mere possibility of bodily Motion. Trendelenburg, who has criticised the Kantian subjectivity of Space, holds also that Space is not the presupposition but the product of Motion. The Jaina philosophers criticise all these attempts to identify Space with the principles of Motion and Rest and in our discourse on Dharma and Adharma we had already an occasion to notice this criticism of the Jaina's. We need not reproduce the arguments in extenso here. It would be sufficient to mention here