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Mokṣa

Conceptual definition

Liberation (designated by Sanskrit terms including mokṣa, mukti, nirvāṇa, kaivalya, apavarga, and others) is release from the cycle of life and death fueled by karma, i.e., actions and their results. A variety of South Asian philosophies that disagree on many other fundamental issues agree on this much: that since life intrinsically involves suffering—since birth necessarily brings in its train old age, sickness, and death—liberation from the same is the summum bonum. Karma not only fuels the cycle (saṃsāra) but is fueled by it too. It is thus usually considered to require immense time and effort, not to mention great good fortune, to break the cycle and be released from the bondage (bandha) of suffering, ignorance, and finitude generally.

Philosophical significance

Freedom has been a central concern of philosophers in far-flung places and times, but takes very different shapes depending on the conditions from which one seeks to be free and the goods that one hopes to be free to attain. Although set in culturally-specific cosmological frameworks, the basic South Asian concept of liberation captures certain elements that should be acceptable to any theorist of freedom, namely: the conditions from which liberation is sought are characterized by limitation and suffering; the limitations in question are imposed upon our actions and their results; but our actions, with the help of knowledge, may transcend these conditions to attain ultimate satisfaction. Such a view of liberation can be placed in fruitful dialogue with accounts of the metaphysics and ethics of free will, the philosophy of intentional action, and political discourses of emancipation.

Historical context

As far as we can tell from the Rig Veda—the oldest South Asian liturgies known—liberation did not much figure into the early Vedic religion, which focused instead on the rewards of ritual in this world and in the next. In the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E., however, the cyclic view of life appeared and a great shift occurred in which endless births and deaths came to appear rather tiresome and painful. In the Upaniṣads are found some of the earliest mentions of karma as an ethically-charged determinant of one’s worldly fate and the importance of transcending its bondage. In the canonical Buddhist diagnosis from around the same time, the source of this bondage and suffering is ultimately desire and its solution is detachment.

Beginning in the same period, the Jains—followers of the Jinas, literally “conquerers” of the afflictions of life—draw the contours of liberation into particularly sharp relief. From the earliest Jain scriptures, karma is a material substance that binds the spirit to the world, obstructing and distorting one’s vision and knowledge in the process. Through moral and yogic practices that quell the passions and minimize the negative impact of one’s actions upon other sentient beings, the Jain path of purification seeks to expurgate karma and stop any further influx into the soul.

Thus one develops right vision, knowledge, and conduct, which consummate in omniscience (kevala/kaivalya), as described by the authoritative Sanskrit catechism That Which Is (Tattvārthasūtra) of Umāsvāti/Umāsvāmi around the middle of the first millennium C.E. Some benign karma may remain after the most deleterious kind is removed, allowing a omniscient master to remain embodied in the world and teach for a period. Ultimately, though, a soul that has attained such a level will be perfected (siddha), having transcended all karmic action and now experiencing its eternally pure nature of consciousness and bliss at the roof of the universe where it has arisen after jettisoning its karmic burden. Purged of adventitious baggage, the soul is now pure and thus essentially identical to every other perfected soul. It does not, however, lose its individuality as imagined in Vedantic monism or Buddhist idealism: it maintains its particular identity and differentiation according place, time, state, and even shape, as well as various more arcane parameters.

Such temporary persistence of karma and ultimate retention of elements of individuality may seem to compromise the degree of transcendence offered by the Jain notion of liberation. But it serves the important function of maintaining the coherence and salience of the very notion of karma and the yogic practices meant to eliminate it. These practices seem fruitless in the most gnoseological forms of Vedānta and Buddhism: if liberation solely requires dissociation from the gratuitious aspects of one’s personality and the insight that one truly is not who one usually takes oneself to be, karma turns out to be an illusion and one can apparently dispense with the physical ascetic practices that target it.

This tension between asceticism and a purely gnoseological approach to liberation is felt acutely in the eminent Jain philosopher Kundakunda during the period of Umāsvāmi. Many philosophers in the ensuing millennium wrestle with this tension and resolve it in their own ways; but it is not until the rather heterodox Adhyātma movement at the dawn of modernity that Jain thinkers inspired by Kundakunda boldly disclaim the importance of all external practices, favoring the liberating power of inner faith.

Overview of significant references/uses

Jaini’s is the classic work on the purificatory path of asceticism seeking liberation, although it is surprisingly silent on the nature and achievement of liberation itself. Potter’s rather idiosyncratic reading of the basic concerns of Indian philosophy centers liberation and provides an unusual treatment of the Jain theory of relations. Tatia reviews Jain criticisms of other philosophical attempts to reconcile gnoseological liberation with the metaphysics of the soul and karma. Johnson reads Kundakunda’s ambivalence between asceticism and gnoseology sociologically as a capitulation to the laity’s need for opportunities to pursue liberation without having to go in for the full renunciation required of mendicant specialists.

Related terms

Emic

mokṣa, mukti, nirvāṇa, kevala, kaivalya, apavarga, saṃsāra, karma, bandha, tapas, siddha

Etic

Liberation, freedom, bondage, renunciation, ascesis, asceticism, identity

References

Jaini, Padmanabh S. The Jaina Path of Purification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Johnson, W. J. Harmless Souls: Karmic Bondage and Religious Change in Early Jainism with Special Reference to Umāsvāti and Kundakunda. 1st ed. Lala Sunder Lal Jain Research Series, vol. 9. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1995.

Potter, Karl H. Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1991.

Tatia, Nathmal. Studies in Jaina Philosophy. Sanmati Publication 6. Banaras: Jain Cultural Research Society, 1951.

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Identity

by Anil Mundra

Conceptual definition

Most generally, identity is what any thing is. In South Asian philosophy of religion, a most pressing question has always been the question of personal identity: what a person really is. This is usually phrased as the problem of the nature of the self (ātman) in Sanskritic contexts; but these discussions very often involve the more general issues of ontological identification, especially in Jain and Buddhist discussions. What makes something the thing that it is, in contradistinction to other things? Does it possess a stable nature (svabhāva) that defines it? If it does, what is the connection between tokens of a type (sāmānya) of things with the same nature? How to understand a thing’s persistence through time, particularly if it is observed to change—is it the self-same thing after the change, or has the original thing passed out of existence to be replaced by something else?

Philosophical significance

These are questions that have vexed philosophers of various stripes. Many have doubted whether there can be any rigorous concept of identity generalizable across the various contexts in which it is customarily called upon, and whether it is even possible to stipulate the concept without either circularity or incoherence. Part of the problem is that there are at least two basic acceptations of the term: most contemporary metaphysicians prioritize what they call “numerical identity” or “self-sameness”—a thing’s simply being itself—over what is currently the more colloquial sense that classifies an individual in a class with others of its own kind on the basis of some quality, such that an individual can be said to “have” an identity, or even have various identities. This disjunction between what we can call “numerical identity” and “qualitative identity” coheres with an Aristotelian metaphysic that tends to cleave self-subsisting substance from the attributes that it possesses. Some South Asian philosophers, however, resist this presumption of the priority of substance to quality.

Historical context

The earliest Vedic Upanishads are famous for their inquiries into the self and their various grand pronouncements about who and what we really are. They often tend to identify oneself with one’s consciousness, not unlike some early modern Western philosophers, although they do not always equate consciousness with intellection and emotion. The Sāṃkhya philosophy is a radical instance of identifying the person (puruṣa) with consciousness as distinguished from all mental functions and even ego, which are placed along with material objects on the side of heterogeneous nature. The Jain philosophical tradition agrees that consciousness is an essential characteristic of the soul; but this may not exhaust the Jain view of the self.

One of the standard criteria of personal identity is the presupposition, shared amongst all Indian philosophers, that anything deserving to be called one’s true identity must be in some way permanent. Something flitting in and out of existence can hardly be said to count as oneself. But according to scholastic Buddhist metaphysics, everything is in constant flux from moment to moment  and there is nothing at all having a stable nature.

The Jains, as is their wont, countenance both the permanence and impermanence of identity without acquiescing in either one-sided view scouted above. The most authoritative Jain doctrinal handbook—the Sanskrit That Which Is (Tattvārthasūtra) of Umāsvāti/Umāsvāmi—defines an entity as that which is subject to origination, perdurance, and dissolution, thus giving equal place to the stability emphasized by Brahminical philosophers and the momentariness of Buddhists. As Jain philosophers of non-one-sidedness say, indeed, it is just this conjunction of contraries like permanence and impermanence that singles out any thing as the particular thing it is, persisting in its identity through its various states of empirical change.

One of the ways Jain philosophy accomplishes this ostensibly oxymoronic ontology is through a particular view of substance as precisely that which persists amidst change, as well as that in which change is seen to occur—that is, it is both the substrate of change as well as the substratum of attributes, both the basis of numerical identity and of qualitative identity. Moreover, according to Siddhasena’s classic Essay on the Dialectic of Proper Thinking (Sanmatitarkaprakaraṇa), substance and the qualities that it possesses are equally real and inseparable. Haribhadra’s Victory-Flag of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntajayapatākā) furthermore suggests that both are equally necessary for the constitution of a thing’s identity. The basic, intuitive thesis of this work is that any real thing is what it is, and is not what it is not—a statement of the meaning of identity if ever there were one. What is at stake in this ostensibly trivial proposition is a certain view of the determinacy of identity: that to be is to exist as something—articulated in terms of attributes determined along various dimensions of predication—and not to exist as something else. To be self-identical, on this analysis, is to possess a certain configuration of qualitative identities.

The distinction between self and other is fundamental for Jain ontology; and it bears also on the more sociological issues involved in the qualitative identities that are most commonly at stake in the discourses of religious studies, namely, religious identities. A non-one-sided view of individuals is partially definitive of what it is to be Jain and not other than Jain. One-sided approaches tend to overemphasize certain kinds of praxis, such as purely gnoseological epiphanies, at the expense of more gradualistic negotiations between body and mind. Part of the way that Jains assert and maintain their religious identity is by philosophizing about identity itself.

Significant references/uses

Cort takes the kernel of Jain ontology to be the relationship of self and other—that is, soul and what is adventitious to it—but also means for this opposition to extend to the social identities of Jains in relation to non-Jains. Johnson has explicated how contestation over Jain views of the soul challenge and maintain the asceticism that is part of Jain social identity, and has suggested that the metaphysics of non-one-sidedness can serve as a bulwark against radical views threatening to obviate the physical rituals that make Jains who they are.

Related terms

Emic

ātman, jīva, puruṣa, svabhāva, śūnyatā, anekāntavāda, kṣaṇikavāda

Etic

Personal identity, qualitative identity, self, soul, momentariness, substance, attribute

References

Barbato, Melanie. Jain Approaches to Plurality: Identity As Dialogue. Leiden ; Boston: Rodopi Bv Editions, 2017.

Cort, John E. “Introduction.” In Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History, edited by John E. Cort, 1–14. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998.

Ganeri, Jonardon. Identity as Reasoned Choice: A South Asian Perspective on the Reach and Resources of Public and Practical Reason in Shaping Individual Identities. New York: Continuum, 2012.

Johnson, W. J. Harmless Souls: Karmic Bondage and Religious Change in Early Jainism with Special Reference to Umāsvāti and Kundakunda. 1st ed. Lala Sunder Lal Jain Research Series, vol. 9. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1995.

Kapstein, Matthew T. Reason’s Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian & Tibetan Buddhist Thought. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001.

Matilal, B. K. “A Note on the Jaina Concept of Substance.” Sambodhi 5, no. 2–3 (1976): 3–12.

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Anekāntavāda

(un-ake-AHN-tuh-VAH-duh) / non-one-sidedness

by Anil Mundra

Conceptual definition

Anekāntavāda, literally the “theory of non-one-sidedness” in Sanskrit, is a characteristically Jain metaphysical and semantic doctrine according to which any real and determinate thing admits of contrary predications. For example, a thing is classically said to be both existent and nonexistent; permanent and impermanent; universal and particular; and denotable and undenotable. The contradiction that would prima facie result from the application of such contrary pairs is averted by parameterizing each term so that it and its negation are not applied in the same way; for example, a thing is existent at one time and place, and nonexistent at another. The resultant propositions issue neither in contradiction nor in equivocation on the terms under discussion: “existent” and “nonexistent” remain genuine contraries, but the scope of their truthful application to a thing is now appropriately specified.

Philosophical significance

Anekāntavāda is thus a way to disambiguate language and fully determine the objects of discourse. Philosophers of non-one-sidedness take exception to the sweeping claims of universal scope that religious doctrines tend to promote about the fundamental nature of reality. They point out the ways in which such absolutist propositions fly in the face of common sense and undermine themselves. Take one of the most pressing examples of such claims in the context of South Asian religions: if one’s true self is said to be absolutely eternal, there would seem to be no way to account for its apparent change and (most importantly) progress toward the summum bonum; while if it is said to be absolutely transient and always in flux, there is no way to account for its continuation along such a progressive path. The self must thus be conceived as both permanent (qua substratum of change) and impermanent (in the progressive development of its states).

Historical context

The first intimations of the doctrine are found in the oldest Jain scriptures written in Prakrit. The founding figure of all current Jain traditions, the Jina Mahāvīra, tells questioners that the soul is permanent insofar as it continues, but impermanent insofar as it takes different forms in successive incarnations. Mahāvīra sometimes prefaces each of such contrary pronouncements with the qualification “in some way” (siyā in the original Prakrit). This hedge makes it clear why contrary predications can apply to the same thing consistently: they apply in different ways, and so do not contradict each other. These ways of applying predicates are often systematized in terms of a canonical group of parameters (called nikṣepas), such as place, time, substance, and state. While a predicate may be truly applied to an object at some values of these parameters, its contrary may be applied with equal truth at other values. In the scholastic period, this approach will come to be called syādvāda, the “in-some-way theory” (syāt being the Sanskrit equivalent of the hedge siyā).

The most authoritative Jain doctrinal handbook—the Sanskrit That Which Is (Tattvārthasūtra) of Umāsvāti/Umāsvāmi around the middle of the first millennium C.E.—encapsulates the basic ontological insight of non-one-sidedness in its pronouncement that all existents are marked by arising, perdurance, and passing away. It also broaches a new way of parameterizing propositions: viewpoints (naya), i.e., contexts or methods through which propositions are to be interpreted. These viewpoints are said to complement the reliable means of awareness (pramāṇa) that are at the center of Indian epistemology. Siddhasena’s Introduction to Logic (Nyāyavatāra) elaborates this relationship by suggesting that reliable means of awareness serve to remove ignorance, while viewpoints provide access to partial truths that do not exclude contrary alternative views of the many-sided reality; but these various one-sided viewpoints can together fully determine an object through the use of syādvāda. The Essay on the Dialectic of Proper Thinking (Sanmatitarkaprakaraṇa, which may or may not be by the same Siddhasena) undertakes to systematize the various viewpoints, proclaiming each one is correct in its own sphere and only there: non-one-sidedness thus demands that none of them be regarded as either absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

As scholastic Jain discourse develops in conversation with other religions in the lingua franca of Sanskrit in the latter half of the first millennium, anekāntavāda is increasingly applied to a range of philosophical dilemmas. Samantabhadra’s Investigation of Authorities (Āptamīmāṃsā) formatively tackles not only existence vs. nonexistence and permanence vs. impermanence, but also unity vs. diversity, identity vs. difference (particularly between cause and effect, substance vs. property, etc.), reason vs. scripture, and even the crucial ethical and soteriological issues of violence vs. nonviolence and the status of knowledge and ignorance vis-à-vis bondage and liberation. Haribhadra’s Victory-Flag of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntajayapatākā) and the works of Akalaṅka set the terms for the ensuing tradition by integrating Samantabhadra’s approach into the reigning idiom of Buddhist logic and metaphysics, turning anekāntavāda back against the Buddhist idealism that challenges the realism of rigoristic Jain asceticism.

By the time of Prabhācandra and the great polymath Hemacandra in the first half of the second millennium, both the nayavāda and syādvāda are accepted components of anekāntavāda.  The syādvāda, moreover, is now standardly considered not only to involve both affirmation and negation but also a third operator of inexpressibility (avaktavyatva/avācyatā), which is sometimes explained as encoding a fusion (per impossibile) of affirmation and negation. Later thinkers elaborate the formula (mentioned briefly in Siddhasena and Samantabhadra) of conjoining these three operators in every mathematical combination, so that syādvāda is now considered to involve a seven-fold (saptabhaṅgī) predication of contraries. And the nayavāda, for its part, is increasingly depicted as mapping extant philosophical schools, such that each is seen as affording its own partial view of reality.

Significant references/uses by contemporary scholars

Modern scholars have interpreted anekāntavāda in sundry ways: from “non-absolutism” (Mookerjee) and “non-extremism” (Sanghvi) to “relativity” (Balcerowicz) and “synthesis” (Matilal) or “syncretism” (Ganeri). Matilal’s influential reading rightly rejects Padmarajiah’s “indetermination” and Thomas’s idiosyncratic “non-unequivocality”; but Matilal’s own interpretation of Jain epistemology as “non-radicalism” or especially “intellectual ahiṃsā [nonviolence]” (following Dhruva) and “toleration” (following Kapadia) are not much better (Cort). We might say, in good non-one-sided fashion, that each of these glosses is applicable to anekāntavāda in some way but fails to unambiguously capture the thing itself in its full determinacy.

Related terms

Emic

syādvāda, nayavāda, nikṣepa, nyāsa, saptabhaṅgī, pramāṇa, syāt,

Etic

compossibility of contraries; determinate negation; non-absolutism; perspectivism; relativism; viewpoints;

References

Balcerowicz, Piotr. “Some Remarks on the Opening Sections in Jaina Epistemological Treatises.” In Śāstrārambha: Inquiries into the Preamble in Sanskrit, edited by W. Slaje. Abhandlungen Für Die Kunde Des Morgenlandes, Bd. 62. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008.

Cort, John E. “‘Intellectual Ahiṃsā’ Revisited: Jain Tolerance and Intolerance of Others.” Philosophy East and West 50, no. 3 (2000): 324–47.

Dhruva, A. B. “Introduction.” In Syādvādamañjarī of Malliṣeṇa with the Anyayoga-Vyavaccheda-Dvātriṃśikā of Hemacandra, xiii-cxxv. Bombay Sanskrit and Prakrit Series 83. Bombay: Department of Public Instruction, 1933.

Dixit, K. K. Jaina Ontology. Lālabhāī Dalapatabhāī Granthamālā 31. Ahmedabad: LD Institute of Indology, 1971.

Ganeri, Jonardon. “Rationality, Harmony, and Perspective.” In Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Kapadia, H. R. “Introduction.” In Anekāntajayapatākā by Haribhadra Sūri, with His Own Commentary and Municandra Sūri’s Supercommentary, ix-cxxviii. Gaekwad’s Oriental Series 88/105. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1940.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Central Philosophy of Jainism (Anekānta-Vāda). Ahmedabad: LD Institute of Indology, 1981.

Mookerjee, Satkari. The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism: A Critical Study of Anekāntavāda. 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978.

Padmarajiah, Y. J. A Comparative Study of the Jaina Theories of Reality and Knowledge. Bombay: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal, 1963.

Sanghavi, Sukhlalji. “Anekāntavāda: The Principal Jaina Contribution to Logic.” In Advanced Studies in Indian Logic & Metaphysics, 15–28. Calcutta: R. K. Maitra; distributors: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyaya, 1961.

Thomas, F. W. The Flower-Spray of the Quodammodo Doctrine: Syād-Vāda-Mañjarī. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968.