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CO-EXISTENCE AND RELATIVITY
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whole from its partial aspect in this approach a particular attribute emerges and the rest are thrown in the background This order of emergence and disappearance disintegrates the thing into numberless parts However, in the substratum lies the thing itself, whole and intact The knowledge of the whole and its expression is certainly true The knowledge and expression of the part is also true if qualified with the term 'perhaps' to convey the relative sense implied in it
h A woman was churning the milk One hand would move forward and another backward Again the hand ahead would withdraw and the one that had been withdrawn earlier moved forward The cyclical motion of hands would yield the cream The process of churning out the cream of knowledge is identical The instant mode of the thing rises to the surface and the rest sink below Next, the second mode emerges and the previous one disappears Thus the ocean of the thing keeps vibrating in the undulating modes The purpose of the Anekantic logic (relativism) is to express the whole by means of its parts
By propounding the principle of relativism the Lord made a novel contribution to intellectual non-violence Numberous philosophers indulged intellectual acrobatics during his age The practice of propounding one's own doctrine and refuting that of another was there in full swing In such an atmosphere Mahavira professed-'Your doctrine is not false only you propound it without the support of a relativistic approach You portrary the part as whole From this angle your doctrine
alse Prop it with relativism and your enunciation will en'noble the falsity to the plane of truth, symbolizing the part as whole A Jain thinker has in this context described Mahavira's logic as a collocation of false views All the partial views are false on account of their absolute assertion As soon as they are aggregated with the tincture of relativism the philosophy of Mahavira emerges
This is what Siddhasena Diwakar means in his verse'Lord! As the rivers merge into the ocean, all visions ,
