Arvind Sharma
Some scholars make a fairly accurate presentation of the doctrine but the examples they cite to illustrate the doctrine seem to be potentially misleading. Thus A.L. Basham writes:
(1) We may truthfully affirm a given proposition (syādasti). Thus when in winter I come home after a walk in the open air, I may say that my room is warm.
(2) But from another point of view it is possible to negate the same proposition (syānnāsti). Thus someone who has been sitting in the same room for some time may say with equal truth that it is not warm.
(3) Hence it is possible to predicate the truth of a proposition and its negation at one and the same time (syādastināsti). The room is both warm and not-warm.
(4) But the true character of the room, which we have seen is from different points of view warm, not-warm, and warm-and-not-warm, may be said to be indescribable (syādavaktavya). It's true character, sub specie aeternitatis, eludes us.[1]
In this example heat and cold have been simultaneously predicated for the same room. But Malliṣeṇa, while commenting on Hemacandra, and discriminating syādvāda from contradiction states 'Where two things are mutually exclusive, such as cold and heat, there is contradiction which is defined as the impossibility of their existing together'[2], so that the example of heat and cold becomes somewhat suspect. Moreover, the experience of heat and cold is related to the subjective experience of the person in the example and this too makes the example suspect as according to Jain philosophy 'Our judgments about things are relative - but relative to or dependent upon not simply the mood of the judging mind but upon the relational characters of the many-sided reality itself.[3] It seems that syādvāda is to be associated with the plurality of objective reality rather than the whimsicality of subjective notions.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds., op. cit., p 266. The entire passage runs as follows:
This is the meaning: Where two things are mutually exclusive, such as cold and heat, there is contradiction which is defined as the impossibility of their existing together. But such is not the case here, because existence and non-existence occur by reason of the non-universal nature of both. For in a pot, existence does not exclude non-existence, because [if it did] existence even in other forms would result. And so there would be no status as objects of other objects except that [the pot], because of the accomplishment by it alone of [all] actions to be effected by [all] the objects in the three worlds. And non-existence does not exclude existence, because [if it did] non-existence [of an entity] even in its own form would follow. And so, universal emptiness would follow because of absence of matter. There would be a contradiction in case existence and non-existence were referred to the same aspect. But that is not so here, because in whatever part existence is, non-existence also is not in that part. However, existence belongs to one aspect, and non-existence belongs to another aspect. For existence [of an entity] is in regard to its own form and non-existence in regard to another form.
