Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
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orientations of Indian philosophical traditions. He has done this very lucidly. If anyone knows certain relevant classifications and if he knows that a particular author of a certain text is, for example, a Jaina thinker, he can easily predict the types of problems that the author might have discussed and the type of solutions which he might have offered.
A.
Realist and Idealist Systems.
Sukhlalji, in his Introduction (translated from Hindi into English by Indukala Jhaveri), has classified the Indian philosophical systems into two classes. The realist include Nyāya-Vaišesika, Pūrvamīmāmsā, Samkhya-Yoga schools, Cārvāka, the two realistic schools of Buddhism, the Madhvite Vedānta etc. Sūnyavāda as well as Vijñānavāda schools of Buddhism and the Samkarite school of Vedānta are the main Indian idealist philosophies.
The idealists maintain that the external world is unreal and only the internal world is real. The realists believe that the world apprehended by the empirical (laukika) organs of knowledge is real and the world apprehended by the transcendent (lokottara) organs of knowledge is also real. Realists maintain that all truth is of the same kind though differing in degrees and real objects are capable of being expressed in words.
Sukhlalji first classifies the systems into realistic and idealistic and then he points out that Jaina system has never changed its realistic standpoint, but there was a change from realism to idealism in Buddhism and Vedānta.
Locating Jainism with reference to this classification, Sukhlalji writes in his Introduction that, "its basic attitude of non-absolutism (anekāntavāda) notwithstanding, the Jaina standpoint is absolutely realistic (ekāntataḥ vāstavaādin) in nature." (Shah, 2002, p, 4)
This clearly means that no Jaina thinker in any of his works can ever give up the realistic position and this also means that he can not synthesize idealism with realism at any stage at all. Sukhlalji has admitted this by saying that realism is the unchangeable character of the Jaina standpoint as is also the case with other non-Jaina Indian realist systems. The realistic systems, like the Jaina system, use both reasonable analysis and reasonable synthesis as they give equal importance to the empirical and the transcendent world. B. Five Indian positions as to the degrees of competence of the various organs of knowledge.
Sukhlalji, in his Introduction, (Shah, 7-10] has identified five Indian positions as to the degrees of competence of the various organs of knowledge as under;
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