________________
Concept of Omniscience in Jainism
: 159
To this Jainas says that the omniscient knowledge is not successive but simultaneous. Mīmāmsakas further argue and ask whether such a simultaneous knowledge is apprehended by one cognition or by several cognitions. If the former is the case then it is impossible to perceive contradictory thing like pure and impure at once by a single cognition.
In fact there are certain things mutually incompatible, they are cognizable by the same cognition. We do have simultaneous perception of darkness and light when there is a flash of lightening in a dark night. Mīmārsakas say that if there is nothing incompatible, in contraries figuring in the same cognition, and then it should be possible pleasure and pain, love and hate also to figure in the same cognition. To this objection it may be replied that pleasure and pain are not simultaneously cognized because they do not appear at one and same time on account of the fact the causes of both can not be presented at the same time, and not on incompatibility.
Mīmārsakas say that in knowing things existing in all times, one may know the objects of past and future either as they are or as existent in the present. If the omniscient being knows the past and the future, which are not existent, his knowledge would be illusory. If the past and the future are known as existent, they are converted into the present. If the past and the future were known by the omniscient as present, his knowledge again would be illusory. Hence, in both the cases omniscience is impossible.
Jainas turning aside the objection say that past and future are perceived by the omniscient not at present, but as past and future. Hence, there is no question of being it illusory. The past and future things are as much existent and real in relation to their own time as the present things are in relation to the present. In fact, the omniscient knows past objects as existing in the past and future objects as existing in the future.
On the objection raised by Mīmāmsakas that if the omniscient knows all the objects at one and the same time, he would become unconscious in the next moment and he would nothing left to cognize,
