Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in India > The Jainas

The Jainas

The Jainas follow Mahāvīra, the Jina, “the victor”, traditionally dated 599–527 BCE. Their oldest extant treatise in Sanskrit is the Tattvārthasūtra, from around 150–400 CE. In the eighth century Haribhadra wrote the oldest known survey of the schools.

The Tattvārthasūtra opens: “Right belief, (right) knowledge, (right) conduct, these (together constitute) the path to liberation” (1.1, tr. Jaini). The first term is darśana, view or belief, and the translator adds that “right belief is not identical with faith … It is reasoned knowledge”. The three are one path: the inquiry is part of the way to liberation, not a pursuit beside it.

How knowledge is reached, the treatise answers in one line: “through the means of knowing and the standpoints” (pramāṇanayair adhigamaḥ, 1.6). A standpoint (naya) is “a stand-point which gives partial knowledge of a thing in some particular aspect of it”. From it grew the doctrine of many-sidedness (anekāntavāda): any statement about a thing holds “somehow” (syāt), from a standpoint, and the tradition sets out seven forms of such statement, the thing as being, as non-being, as both, as indescribable, and their combinations, each made “in accordance with the speaker’s intention and not in an absolute fashion” (Samantabhadra, Āptamīmāṃsā 14, as rendered by Gorisse). Applied to the schools themselves, the doctrine of standpoints explains why there are rival philosophies: each, in the Jaina account, results “from an initial choice of an epistemic perspective”, and a rival system is “the erroneous radicalization of a perspective” (as Gorisse reports it).

The Jainas also gave the rules for doing it in public. Later Jaina theory, in Vādi Devasūri and Hemacandra, requires a debate “with four components”: the proponent, the opponent, the judges and a president. The president is to “avert a quarrel between the debating parties (—by saying that he who is defeated shall become the disciple of the victor, and the like), and give away prizes” (as rendered by Solomon).

Haribhadra’s Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya, “the compendium of the six views”, opens by bowing to “the Jina Vīra, of true vision, teacher of syādvāda”, Mahāvīra, who taught the “somehow”, and states “in brief what all the views (darśana) set out”. It counts the views “by their root differences”, “of deity and principles”, and names six: Buddhist, Naiyāyika, Sāṃkhya, Jaina, Vaiśeṣika and Jaiminīya (Mīmāṃsā); for those who count Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika as one, the materialists make up the sixth. Vedānta is not among them. The Jaina surveys set the six out in no ranking order. A verse of Haribhadra’s, quoted by his commentator Guṇaratna, reads: “I have no partiality for Vīra, nor hostility toward Kapila [Sāṃkhya’s founder] and the rest; whoever’s word is reasoned, it should be accepted” (Lokatattvanirṇaya 38).