Acharya Mahaprajna
Truth is ever free and unconditioned. Every sect maintains, "Our creed alone is true!" This upholding of one's own creed as truth only serves to advance untruth. Lord Mahavira said: "Anekanta (many-sided perception) is true; one-sided perception is not true.' A total, comprehensive view constitutes truth. Yet the aphorism read: "Only unconditioned observation is true."
The cause of untruth is - conditioning. A person, whose mind is not conditioned in any way, develops no complexes. Such a person is wholly unconditioned, detached. The stubbornness of untruth is the biggest knot, the highest complication and the greatest falsehood. The person, in whom this mental knot is resolved, finds entrance into the kingdom of truth.
An unconditioned observation is free from any stubbornness of opinion. It neither accepts nor represents a partial, one-sided approach. It only expounds a truth-oriented vision. Only such an unconditioned observation is true. It means that anekant - a comprehensive, many-sided approach - alone is true.
The unconditioned is a symbol of straightforwardness or non-insistence. It is on account of attachment, aversion, anger, pride, etc. that a man accepts or portrays untruth and insists upon the illusory, the unreal. The ignorant person does all this. The unconditioned person worships both knowledge and veetaragata. The outlook of the wise and the veetaraga is truth-oriented. There does not appear to be any difficulty in accepting their realization - the unconditioned observation - as truth.
In Jain philosophy truth is not identified with a particular person or tradition, but with a particular state of mind. From this point-of-view, too, the unconditioned observation is true and there should be no difficulty in asserting that only the unconditioned observation is true.
