Selected Speeches of V R Gandhi

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi Godiji Jain Derasar Mumbai

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eternality, the real Mukti, comes from work and knowledge together, not from one alone. Through work and knowledge, Jainism says, the individual develops and unfolds the potential; therefore, the statement, “I am Brahman," would be interpreted by a Jaina to mean—I am Brahman only inherently, or in embryo; I have the capacity or the actual possibility of Brahman; what I am implicitly must become explicit. There is a vast difference between the implicit and the explicit. Those who do not recognize this difference would never make an attempt to become rational and free.
The doctrine of the Jainas known as Syādvāda or Anekāntavāda, it is proper to affirm, in the words of a writer in America
“is competent to descend into the utmost minutiæ of metaphysics and to settle all the vexed questions of abstruse speculation by a positive method (not merely asserting na iti, na iti, not so, not so)-to settle at any rate the limits of what it is possible to determine by any method which the human mind may be rationally supposed to possess. It promises to reconcile all the conflicting schools, not by inducing any of them necessarily to abandon their favourite 'standpoints', but proving to them that the standpoints of all others are alike tenable ; or, at least, that they are representative of some aspect of truth which under some modification needs to be represented ; and that the Integrity of Truth consists in this very variety of its aspects within the relational unity of an all comprehensive and ramifying principle."
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