Religion and Culture of the Jains

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

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RELIGION & CULTURE OF THE JAINS
lukewarm. In fact, in their Syādvādist Anekāntism the Jaina philosophers of ancient India anticipated in substance the famous Theory of Relativity formulated by Einstein, the great scientistcum-philosopher of the modern age. Einstein himself explained his theory by such examples as: when a man talks to a pretty girl for an hour it seems to him only a minute, but let him sit on a hot stove for only a minute and it is longer than an hour. In another context he says, “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world". Even the idealist Hegal says, “Every thing contains within itself its opposite. It is impossible to conceive of any thing without conceiving any thing of its opposite. A cow is a cow, and is at the same time not a cat. A thing is itself only, because at the same time it is not something else. Every thesis for an argument has its antitheses. Truth lies on both sides of every question. The truth is either-sided. All nature is a reconciliation of opposites.”
And, the psychologist Freud remarks: “We cannot make true things false or false things true by choosing to think them so. We cannot vote right into wrong, or wrong into right. The eternal truths and rights and things exist fortunately independent of our thoughts or wishes, fixed as mathematics inherent in the nature of man and the world."
Another modern thinker, Prof. Hajima Nakamuro of Tokyo, observes, “If East is East and West is West, which is East and which is West? India, which is East to the Americans, has always been and will remain West to the Chinese and Japanese. Hiuen Tsang has entitled the diary of his Indian sojourn as the Travel Records in the West."
It should not be out of place here to reproduce the views of a few of the many modern thinkers and scholars who after