What is Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 21

SACRED PHILOSOPHY
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accidents or modes. The Imperial Dictionary defines it in the following words :
"In philosophy that which underlies or is the permanent subject or cause of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual; the subject which we imagine t lie the attributes or qualities by which alone we are conscious of existences, that which exists independently and unchangeably, in contradistinction to accident, which denotes any of the changeable phenomena in substance, whether these phenomena are necessary or causal, in which latter case they are called accidents in a narrower sense, The relation of accident to substance is called the relation of inherence, and corresponds to the logical relation of subject and predicates, because the substance is the subject to which are assigned the qualities, states and relations as predicates; substance itself is the essence which is capable of these phenomena, and, in spite of these changes, remains the same. Substance is, with respect to the mind, a merely logical distinction from its attributes. We can never imagine it, but we are compelled to assume it. We cannot conceive substance shorn of its attributes, because those attributes are the sole staple of our conceptions; but we must assume that substance is something different from its attributes. Substance is the unknown, unknowable substratum on which rests all that we experience of the external world."
This is almost word for word the view of the Jaina Siddhuinta, which defines substance as that which is characterised by origination, destruction and continuance at one and the same time. For instance, when we melt a bar of gold there is the origination of the molten state, the destruction of the “ barness," and underlying them both, the continuity of gold as gold. Nor can we regard the destruction of the bar and the origination of the resultant molten liquidity as being successive events in time ; for no substance can be imagined without a form, and yet the piece of gold in the crucible can have no form, on the supposition, in the interval after the destruction of the solid form and before the manifestation or assumption of the liquid state. To put the same argument in a different form, if the destruction of 'bar-ness' is not simultaneous with the origination of the liquid state, the bar will be destroyed first and its melting, i.e., the assumption of the liquid form, will take place afterwards. But this is absurd, for gold must exist in some form in the interval, and the supposition leaves it altogether without one. This shows that liquefaction is the very form of the destruction of 'bar-ness: so that the destruction of an existing state and the origination of