Reality Has Innumerable Aspects

Anekantavada, "non-one-sidedness," or the doctrine of many-sidedness, is Jainism's claim that reality is manifold and that no single statement can capture it whole. Any given proposition is made from a particular standpoint and grasps a real but partial aspect of things; competing claims are therefore usually partial views rather than simple errors. It is Jainism's most exported idea, frequently invoked as a charter for tolerance, and, its exponents argue, its most misread.

The doctrine has a metaphysical basis in the Jain account of substance: every real thing has innumerable qualities and passes through endless changes while remaining itself, so that it can truly be described as permanent (in its substance) and as impermanent (in its modes), depending on the aspect one attends to. The famous parable of the blind men and the elephant, one grasping the trunk and calling it a snake, another the leg and calling it a pillar, is one the Jains adopted to make exactly this point: each report is accurate to what was touched and wrong only in claiming to be the whole. Knowledge short of omniscience is standpoint-bound, and wisdom begins in recognising this.