World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 334

I have here also referred to N. Shah's first Gujarati translation of Hemacandra's Pramānamīmāmsā (2006) which includes Hemacandra's Sanskrit text also. Shah's Gujarati translation of Pramānamīmāmsā also includes Gujarati translation of Sukhlalji's Preface and Notes
I have not discussed here the main contribution of Ācārya Hemacandra's Pramānamīmāmsā itself. I have also not discussed here the epistemological problems discussed by Sukhlalji in his notes 1 to 27 (Shah; 2002). I have discussed only some of the aspects of Sukhlalji's Introduction, Preface and Notes here. I have only discussed here some of the general issues raised by Sukhlalji himself rather than the problems discussed by Ācārya Hemacandra. For example Sukhlalji has accepted that authentic intercultural understanding is possible by illustrating it with reference to the understanding of the Western scholars of various Indian philosophies. I find this very interesting, but in that context, I have further examined the problem of cultural authenticity versus philosophical universality. My point here is that it is not always due to any misunderstanding, prejudice, error, negative attitudes etc, that the philosophical differences emerge. Each philosophical system in India tries its best to represent the claims and arguments of the other systems with fairness and impartiality and then each of them claims that the other systems have been rejected after proper objective and rational assessment. So intercultural understanding also can not eliminate genuine ontological differences between systems and it is also not meant to do that. Sukhlalji himself has an authentic understanding of various Jaina and NonJaina traditions and he very carefully notes various types of theories on the main topics of Indian epistemology and ontology.
In this context, after the clarification of Sukhlalji's historical and comparative approach in the first Section, the importance of Sukhlalji's classifications of Indian doctrines has been highlighted here in the second section. The tension between originality and fidelity in Indian philosophical texts has also been discussed here in the third section. I have dealt with the theme of authentic intercultural philosophical understanding discussed by Sukhlalji in the fourth section here. I have shown here that authentic philosophical understanding at any level does not necessarily lead to any ontological consensus and such a consensus need not be insisted upon because, tolerance, harmony and peace can be promoted even when there is a broad inter-cultural agreement among different philosophies only on the basic humanistic moral values. The problem of cultural authenticity versus inter-cultural universality has to be faced in the context of philosophical understanding of various traditions, because there can be authentic understanding of the totally different traditions without the acceptance of different incompatible ontologies. Even the explanations of such incompatibilities might turn out to be themselves irreconcilable. I do not mean to say that there is no possibility of misunderstanding, error, deliberate inferiorization of other cultures
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