Anne Clavel
15th Jaina Studies Workshop
Date: 22 March 2013 Time: 9:00 AM
Finished: 22 March 2013 Time: 5:00 PM
Venue: Brunei Gallery Room: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre
Lecturer:
Abstract:
It is well-known that the doctrine of viewpoints (nayavāda) is a cornerstone of the Jaina philosophy of multilateralism inasmuch as the truth of an utterance does not imply that any other utterance is false. The usual distinction between substantial viewpoints (dravyanaya) and modal viewpoints (paryāyanaya), which relies on one of the most fundamental ontological tenets of Jainism, i.e. the necessary coexistence of permanence and change in every existent thing (cf. Umāsvāmin's Tattvārthasūtra V.29), contributes to bringing to the fore this multilateral approach. Another division among the seven viewpoints is based on the difference between the statements which directly consist in an ontological description, "the object-bound viewpoints" (arthanaya), and those which are firstly endowed with a meta-linguistical value since they consider to which extent a word is appropriate for expressing a particular thing, "the word-bound viewpoints" (śabdanaya). In spite of its being an inheritance from the most ancient philosophical texts, this second dichotomy is generally left aside by scholars dealing with the seven nayas from a structural perspective. In contradistinction to this usual trend, the present paper aims at drawing parallelisms between the three word-bound viewpoints (the śabdanaya, amabhirūḍhanaya and evambhūtanaya) and three of the object-bound viewpoints (the saṅgrahanaya, vyavahāranaya and ṛjusūtranaya respectively), so as to establish an underlying structural pattern.
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