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STUDIES IN JAINISM
To my mind, Barlingay is right when he refuses to identifly nayavada with syadvāda, though it is of cource true that some Jaina logicians (hopefully) mistakenly have envisaged the saptabhangi yojana in botn nayavada and syadvada.19 I myself have differentiated the two by saying that saptabhangi or syādvā da has been the case of the Scriptures or the Agamas which assert that the metaphysical reality is anaikantika while nayavada has been harnessed to serve different ends altogether.20 The question, which I think, is of the last importance;, is: how are we to understand syadvādā? In the recent past, so much indeed has been said about it that one feels lost in the jungle of opinions having far-reaching consequences. Barlingay calls syadvada the logic of possibilities21 and regards 'syādasti' as an example of a modal proposition.22 Some look upon it from an angle that it has appeared to them that a calculus of probabilities could be developed on the lines of syadvāda.23 Others have characterised syadvada as the seven-valued logic of the Jaina philosophy.24 Ramchandra Pandeya25 thinks-but he arrives at this result in a way different from mine and independently-that 'sya dasti' and the other syat sentences really are no assertions at all, such that the truth values--true and false--could not be assigned to them. An old scholar of the Jaina philosophy Satkari Mookerji2 treats syat as a corrective proviso. And, the greatest historian of Indian logic, Satish Chandra Vidyabhusana does not hesitate to characterize syadvada or saptabhangi naya as the doctrine of sevenfold paralogisms27! The seven sentences which constitute the syadvada are well-known in the Jaina literature and I give them as follow :28
One : A thing is existent from a certain point of view Two : A thing is non-existent from another point of w. Three: It is both existent and non-existent in turn from a third point of view.
Four It is indescribable29 (that it both exists and does not exist simultaneously)
Five: It is existent and indescribable from a fifth point of view. Six : It is non-existent and indescribable from a sixth point of view. Seven: It is both existent and
from the seventh point of view.
non-existent and indescribable
