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164 : Śramaņa, Vol 57, No. 3-4/July-December 2006
keeping with the consistent Jaina attempt to avoid an absolutistic stand: a dravya is a permanently existing reality insofar as it cannot be destroyed. However, it is not like an Advaitin's eternally existing brahman or ātman insofar as, in the Jaina view, a dravya is also said to undergo change, as seen above. On the other hand, the change that a dravya is capable of undergoing is also not absolutised and from this standpoint the Jaina view avoids the Buddhist notion of eternal change embodied in Kșanikavāda. Upadhye summarizes the Jaina view of substance succinctly and compares it with the Nyāya view : “The substances are not immutable but subjected to constant changes in their qualities and modifications with which they are endowed. A substance divested of qualities and modifications is merely an abstraction, simply a void, and as such is not accepted in Jainism. The Nyāya school, however, accepts that the substances, just at the moment of their creation, are devoid of qualities which come to be intimately related with them only later. Substance is the substratum of qualities and modifications; and the intelligibility of a substance depends on its qualities and modifications, because they are its determinants. The relation between these three is that of nonseparateness because they subsist in the same spatial existence, and of non-identity because one is not the other".14
By virtue of its intrinsic nature a substance (dravya) possesses a quality (guņa) which expresses itself in a particular mode (paryāya). It is in this sense that the permanent substance can change. The Jainas do not take the further step and talk of a substance per se. This would be unintelligible in an absolute sense. Besides, how can one talk of a substance without at the same time referring to the qualities and modes through which one recognizes it? Further, no outside intervention needs to be acknowledged to account for a substance taking on a particular mode- it can change by virtue of its intrinsic nature to be able to do so.
The question of the intrinsic nature or svabhāva of a dravya
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