Science And Jain Philosophy

Author(s): Raksha J Shah, Abhijit Muni, Pooja Banthia
Publisher: International Conference on Science and Jain Philosophy

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International Conference on Science and Jain Philosophy 2016
texts if only they could be properly deciphered, a task he felt compelled to do himself. To engage in dialogue with modern science, ancient wisdom must come to terms with this prominent tendency.
Even as our hallowed traditions have perforce to adapt to the modern world, it is not a one-way street. I recall an anecdote which an Indian student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge, K.J. Shah (whose Wittgenstein lecture notes have been published) narrated to me. Once as they were on a walk together, Wittgenstein stopped and turned round to ask Shah whether he was Muslim, which Shah denied. Wittgenstein then asked if he was Hindu, to which too his student gave the same answer. A perplexed Wittgenstein went on to ask him what his faith was, upon which he said he was Jain. Wittgenstein asked Shah what the Jain religion was about and the latter gave a somewhat distanced account of Jain beliefs, to which Wittgenstein reacted: "so you think you are cleverer than your ancestors, do you?" This conversation had a salutary effect on Shah who became one of India's leading philosophers in his time, as he began to explore our philosophical legacy on returning to India.
What can science learn from Jaina thought? One might plausibly argue that science as a body of organized reasoning that forever questions itself is the polar opposite of spiritual schools which exalt their scriptures to the level of unquestionable truth. Let me side-step the question of meditative practices and their effects on the human mind as that is a field that has been ploughed for quite a long time, indeed for at least half a century. My concern is with ideas and I ask whether modern science makes sense when viewed through the prism of Jaina philosophy. It is generally agreed that within Western philosophy, quantum theory is highly unconventional. Indeed, physicists like Bohr maintained that quantum theory makes great demands on human understanding and sought parallels in Eastern philosophy.
The Jaina concept of 'avaktavya' or 'inexpressible' which applies to statements in addition to the standard truth values, true and false, has parallels in quantum theory. In a double-slit experiment conducted with a weak beam of light that emits one photon at a time, one can either observe interference or establish through which slit the photon arrived at the screen. The concepts of a discrete quantum particle and that of an extended wave are distinctly at odds with one another. When wave-like properties are manifested, we are unable to say anything about the slit through which the photon passed. One is then led to the conclusion that it is avaktavya.
The dualism of aj va and jua mirrors the Cartesian divide which was essential for the scientific revolution which was able to treat the former as a closed causal system subject to natural law. The aj va consisted of pudgala (matter), dharma (dynamics) and adharma (statics), ākāśa (space) and kāla (time). Here, instead of translating dharma as the 'principle of motion' and adharma as the principle of rest' as many scholars do, I have substituted 'dynamics' and 'statics' respectively, which, while being accurate, resonate with the ideas of modern physics formulated in the scientific revolution. What is striking in this context is that j va or soul is an entity to which none of the qualifiers of ajiua apply. Hence j va is not a spatiotemporal entity nor is it subject to the causal order of dynamics or statics. If the realms of the aj ua and jua are so sharply differentiated, how do the two interact? This is a problem which all dualist ontologies, the Cartesian included, are confronted with. Descartes speculated on the possible locus of the interaction which he thought was the
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