Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): Jyoti Prasad Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 97

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
83
the elephat was like they needed a syntheses of all their individual experiences about that animal. Then there is the parable of the Two Foolish Goats which lived and grazed on a mountainside. One day they began to quarrel, one alleging that there was no more grass left, and the cther that there was still plenty of it. Each called the other false. The result of the fight was that they both fell dwon and died. Their king, on investigating the matter, found that both the goats were partly right and partly wrong: one side of the hill was actually barren of grass, whereas the other side had plenty of it. Each goat had only a one-sided view, hence both were foolish and killed each other.
An ancient Jaina sage illustrates the Syādyādist view by the analogy of a milk-maid, churning milk; she holds in each hand one end of the rope wound round the churn-staff and in the process of churning alternately pulls one end, relaxing the other but without letting it go. In the same way, a Syādvādist, when viewing a thing from a particular angle and emphasising one of its aspects, does not lose sight of the other aspect or aspects of the thing. A piece of paper catches fire-the paper burns, the burnt thing is not the paper, the paper is no more, but the elements of which it was made are there; they still exist, only the form has changed. The ocean is there as a permanent entity, but the waves in it are ever forming and reforming, the one giving place to the other—there is permanence in the midst of change, and change in the midst of permanence; unity in the midst of diversity, and diversity in the midst of unity.
That truth is relative may be seen from the example of a man who puts his right hand in a bucket containing ice-cold water and the left in that containing very hot water, simultaneously, then withdraws both the hands and puts them together in a pot of lukewarm water; the right hand will feel hot while, the left hand will feel cold, although the water was only