________________
· 34 : Śramana, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
Tradition and Novelty One of the problems orthodox and diaspora Jains face is how to handle tradition. How can we hold on to the traditions of the past, yet engage the present context in which we live. Orthodox Jainism would probably respond to this that holding on to the traditions of Mahāvīra is tantamount to Jain survival and the notion of the soul. But for Whitehead, to explain why things are the way they are through assertion as well as why we follow them is an explanation by effcient cause and is not by final cause, which is that of the final real reason for why something does what it does. There must be a factor that has never before been given from its past, for the novel introduced "disturbs" the inherited response of the subject. Reflecting Brett Everton's statement, "It is a mistake to view any religious tradition as static or uniform," Jainism is not functioning in a static way, but is very much in flux.26 However, as its guideposts, ahimsā, aparigraha and anekāntavāda, are established in their metaphysical system, it would be difficult to come at the same conclusions of what is of importance, if their is a change to a metaphysical concept, or a change of religious practices. Speaking on tradition and the introduction of an alternative, Whitehead writes, “The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. A new idea introduces a new alternative and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher."'27 To accept tradition without question and to follow in its practices, is just the effcient cause; their is no liveliness to the act. It is in the process of taking tradition and introducing an aspect of the immediate event that makes the actual occassion, the event, alive. It is the how which makes it a final cause, the reason for its becoming, for effecting change its in environment.
For diaspora Jains, the complexity of their situation; western ideals, the essence of the vows of Jainism and their immediate context which constitutes their day to day living require them to hold to the essence of Jainism, which for them are the vows and taking on the new ideals and forming something Jain like.
Flat Ontology The Ontology of Jainism Jainism, it'relies on several notions, the universe as uncreated, that of Jiva and ajīva and several others. It is a universe eternal and everlasting with a universal moral order which exists without a giver and we follow that process through reincarnation to liberation. The most important of these, is the separation of being as jīva and ajiva. This is a bifurcation of nature, a split which is used to explain world of nature and the world beyond it. Thus centering the being in the soul as the end goal, the purest the ideal to reach towards.
Whitehead finds that the soul is not an adequate reason for freedom, nor in this case happiness. He writes, “Life is a bid for freedom: an enduring entity binds any one of its occassions to the line of its ancestry. The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life presents. That problem is, how can these
