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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality In
Jainism and Poststructuralism
Rebekah Sinclair
[The goal of this paper has been to show that Jainism can offer more than just prohibitions of violence--who can and cannot be eaten, owned and addressed. The doctrine anekāntaväda actually provides an extremely rich tradition--perhaps the richest tradition from which to draw our strength for the coming age. As the world changes quickly, as species disappear, as new communities form and others recede into the background, as the boundary between human and non human, nature and culture recedes from the horizon at an ever quickening pace, bodies Jainism has fought so long to defend will depend increasingly upon our ability to form new communities of co-becomings. Their well being and existence will depend upon our ability to release our attachments to clean lines old ethical habits and definitions and jointly form new ones by inhabiting the perspectives of those who have been denied them. It will only be by the principles of anekāntavāda, syādvāda, nayavāda--of attempting to see the perspective of each creature--that we'll be able to gamble, albeit imperfectly, in the direction of messy, beautiful and ever increasing relations of ahissä.]
A Jain Parable: A king once asked his servant to summon five blind men into his courtyard where he had fastned a large elephant and asked them to tell him what it was. Each man touched the elephant and on the basis of their perspective, told the king that he knew what this thing to be. The first felt the trunk and declared that it was a huge snake. The second touched the tail and said it was a rope. The third felt the leg and called it a tree trunk. The fourth took hold of the ear and called it a winnowing fan, while the fifth felt the side of the elephant and declared it to be a wall. Because each insisted that his claim was correct and truly described the object in question, the five men were soon in the middle of a heated argument, unable to resolve the dispute because they failed to recognize that each of their claims was true only from a limited perspective. I. Introduction: Jainism, Pachyderms and Poststructuralism The parable of the blind men and the elephant is often cited to explain the Jain concept of anekāntavāda - the doctrine of multisided, non-one-sidedness, along with its corollaries nayavāda (the doctrine of multiple perspectives) and syādvāda (doctrine of conditional predication). The elephant signifies reality and the blind men represent not only humans but also other creatures; gorillas, giraffes, donkeys, dogs, cows, chickens, even water and plants, all have perspectives on reality as well. But the King is the real hero: he is Mahāvīra, the omniscient one, whose all knowing perspective of reality is the eventual trump card, determining the correctness or incorrectness of the blind men. The moral of the story is most often stated like this: 1) approach situations with a view toward the plurality of partial-truths, for they help us get closer to the full truth, otherwise known only in the Omniscients (kevalins); 2) act compassionately toward others whose perspective might be different: they too are looking at a side of the truth.
