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642
BURCH
determine the truth value for a given proposition but to determine the qualifications which must be specified to make each of the truth values apply. All are valid simultaneously in different respects), not alternatively. The elephant inspected by blind men really and always is somehow like a wall, somehow like a column, somehow like a fan, somehow like a snake; it is not alternatively like a wall, a column, a fan, a snake. There is no skepticism in Jain logic (syat not meaning "maybe"), as Bhattacharyya correctly remarks (I 343), but neither is there alternation. What he calls Jain logic is not the logic of the Jains.
It is not to be supposed that Bhattacharyya mistakenly believed, through ignorance, that he was giving a historically faithful account of Jain teaching. Rather, he was showing, as Gopinath Bhattacharyya says, that "a new interpretation of the Jaina theory of anekanta is possible in the light of the concept of alternation” (I xiv). In a postcard to Professor D. M. Datta dated August 21, 1930, referring to this article, he wrote: "My paper was developed only in the general line of the doctrine of syadvada; if you take it as historical description of Jain philosophy, certainly, there are many errors and defects there which you will easily understand.”69 .
Nevertheless, Professor Kalidas Bhattacharyya of Visvabharati University, who has succeeded his father as the leading advocate of the theory of alternative forms of the Absolute, considers that this article does correctly interpret the Jain tradition. He says he cannot believe that the great Jain philosophers were teaching the trivial truism that there are different ways of looking at things. The aneka (not one) of anekantavada (non-one-end-ism) may have the negative meaning not one or the positive meaning more than one, so that anekantavada might mean "there is no one exclusive feature of reality” or “reality has many features.” But incompatible features cannot be conjointly true; they alternate by not being exclusively true. Anekanta means not what is common in the seven modes, for they have nothing in common; nor integration of the seven modes, for they cannot. logically be integrated; but alternation among the seven modes, the only reasonable interpretation. Since it is the logically correct interpretation, we must assume that it is what the Jain logicians intended. Kalidas Bhattacharrya, if I understand him correctly, maintains that alternation is what the Jains must have taught, whereas his father maintained only that it is what they should have taught.
69 Translation by Kalidas Bhattacharyya.
