Religion and Philosophy of the Jainas

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Jain International Ahmedabad

Page 85

52 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE JAINAS give an emphatic denial. The Jaina position is : First, that right knowledge is the only test or measure on our part of the existence of a reality; secondly, that knowledge is always the knowledge of relations; thirdly, that reality is never out of relations (a particular reality may not be in physical relation with another reality, it may be in the relationship of subject and object, knower and known); and fourthly, that the relations are constantly changing. To be is to be in relation. So when we know a thing, we know the relationwhich it stands to us and to other things. To that extent we know the thing as it is. There are other present relations which we do not know, and there are other possible relations also which we may not know under our present state of development. This residuum of relationships is the noumenon. The task of our research ought to be to fix these unknown "relations, and not to go in quest of the phantom 'thing in itself.' As Mr. George Henry Lewes says: "The illusion of an existence underlying the appearance arises from our tendency to dissociate abstractions from their concretes, and endow the former with a permanent reality denied to the latter." Noumenon and phenomenon are not two separate existences, but only two modes of our looking upon the full content of a thing, a part of which is known and part unknown to us now. The fallacy in the popular mind in reference to these terms is that of confounding a logical distinction with an actual separation.
This leads me to the next point that demands explanation, namely, the difference between Jainism and Buddhism. In the Buddhist view, nothing is permanent. Transitoriness is the only reality. As Professor Oldenberg says : “The speculation of the Brahmins apprehended being in all being, that of the Buddhists becoming in all apparent being." The Jainas, on the contrary, consider being and becoming as two different and complemenary ways of our viewing the same thing. Reality in the Jaina view is a permanent subject of changing states. To be, to stand in relation, to be active, to act upon other things, to obey law,