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śramaņa January-June 2002
and permanence. Here, the charges framed, how the two contradictories change and permanence live in one and the same thing? The Jaina philosophers say that permanence is not to be understood as absolute changelessness. Similarly, change is not to be taken as absolute difference. Permanence means indestructibility of the essential nature or quality of a substance. 14 Change defines origination and destruction of different modes. Reality is transitory as well as permanent, different as well as identical. No object can be absolutely destroyed, nothing can be absolutely permanent. Paryāyas (modes) change, whereas the essential guna (character) remain the same.
Our experience tells us that no object is absolutely identical. We experience this also that the differences are not obsolutely scattered. Jainism accepts this natural commonsense view and maintains that the identity or permanence exists in the midst of all the varying modes or differences. There is no reason to call in question the reality of the changes or of the identity, as both are perceived facts. Every entity is subject to change and maintains its quality and identity throughout its career. Thus, Reality is a synthesis of opposites--identity and difference, permanence and change. Irrespective of other Indian philosophical thought Jainism says, a real is neither a particularity nor a universality exclusively but a synthesis which is different from both separately and jointly though embracing them in its fold. 15
As we know that the Vedantins start with the premise that Reality is one permanent universal conscious existence. The Vaibhāșika and the Sauträntika believe in atomic particulars and momentary ideas, each being absolutely different from the rest and having nothing underlying them to bind together. The Naiyāyika and the Vaišeșika hold particularity and universality to be combined in an individual, though they maintain that the two characters are different and distinct. A Real, according to them, is an aggregate of the universal, i.e. identity and the particular that is, difference, and not a real synthesis. The Jaina differs from all these Indian philosophers and holds that the universal and the particular are only distinguishable traits in an object which is at once identical with and different from
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