Syadvada, and the Charge of Self-Refutation

Anekantavada is worked out through two tools. Nayavada is the doctrine of standpoints, the disciplined analysis of the particular viewpoint from which any claim is true. Syadvada is the sevenfold scheme of conditional predication, each of its seven forms prefaced by syat, "in some respect" or "from a certain standpoint": in some respect a thing is; in some respect it is not; in some respect it both is and is not; in some respect it is inexpressible; and the combinations of these. The syat operator is the heart of the system, marking every assertion as made under a specified condition rather than absolutely.

Rival philosophers attacked it as incoherent. Buddhist logicians such as Dharmakirti, and later the Advaitin Shankara, pressed the objection that a doctrine which makes everything both true and not-true must say the same of itself, and so collapses. The Jain reply is that syat qualifies without contradicting: each of the seven predications is asserted flatly from its own standpoint, and the scheme catalogues compatible partial truths rather than affirming and denying the same thing in the same respect. The atlas also notes a modern misreading: anekantavada is often flattened into a generic relativism or an "all religions are equally true" slogan, whereas in its own setting it is a precise logic of standpoints, not a refusal to make claims.