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76 : Sramaņa, Vol 66, No. 2, April-June 2015 body of theory will meet this test; nor can coherence be manufactured simply by "cutting out some statements and keeping others. The only method for dealing with such apparent incoherences as inevitably do arise is the method of/conditionalised assertion (syādvāda) and non-onesidedness (anaikāntya). To say that the soul is eternal is to depict human subjectivity in one way; to say that the soul is noneternal is to depict it in another: both depictions, in their own way, gesture at something right about what it is to be a human subject. Yaśovijaya then shows how each of the non-Jaina systems does incorporate the spirit, if not the latter, of the principle of nononesidedness.'s Referring by name to Sāṁkhya, Vijñānavāda Buddhism, Vaišeşika, the three Mīmāṁsaka schools of Kumārila, Prabhākara and Murārī, and Advaita Vedānta, he concludes that syādvāda is a doctrine of all the systems (syādvādam sārvatāntrikam).16 The Vedāntins, for example, say that the soul is both bound and unbound, relativising those statements to the conventional and the absolute in order to avoid contradiction. Likewise, Kumārila says that entities are both particular and universal, conditioning these claims upon aspects of experience. Yašovijaya concludes by bringing the discussion back to the cultivation of an attitude of neutrality. All the different systems of belief are equal in requiring of their practitioners that they adopt an attitude of balance and coordination; indeed this balance and neutrality is the very point of śāstra. True religious and moral discourse (dharmavāda) is based on this; the rest is just a sort of foolish hopping about (bālisavalgana)." It is worth emphasising that Yaśovijaya by no means considers the doctrines of conditionalised assertion and nononesidedness to lead to a laissez-faire relativism, for he explicitly here dismisses the Cārvāka as being too confused in their understanding of the topic of liberation even to be said to have a 'view'.18 Neutrality does not mean acceptance of every position whatever, but acceptance only of those which satisfy at least the minimal criteria of clarity and coherence needed in order legitimately to constitute a point of view.
