Syadvada

Syadvada is the Jain doctrine of qualified assertion: every statement about reality should be prefixed with syat, "in some respect" or "from a certain point of view", because reality is many-sided and no single statement captures it whole. It is the linguistic expression of anekantavada, the doctrine of non-onesidedness, which holds that a thing has indefinitely many aspects and that any account selects some and omits others.

The apparatus is formal rather than merely cautionary. The saptabhangi, or sevenfold predication, sets out the possible qualified assertions about any predicate: in some respect it is; in some respect it is not; in some respect it is and is not; in some respect it is indescribable; and three further combinations of the indescribable with the first three. Alongside it stands the naya theory, an analysis of standpoints, substance-focused and mode-focused perspectives and their subdivisions, with the accompanying rule that a standpoint asserted as the whole truth becomes a fallacy, nayabhasa.

The doctrine's classic illustration is the parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which each man touches a different part and reports the whole to be a pillar, a rope or a fan. The parable is not exclusively Jain and appears in Buddhist and other sources, but Jainism made it doctrinal rather than merely illustrative.

Two things are commonly misunderstood. Syadvada is not scepticism or relativism. Jainism holds firmly that there are truths, that its own metaphysics is correct, and that omniscient beings know reality completely and without qualification; the qualification attaches to the partial knowledge and partial statements of the unliberated, not to reality. And syat does not mean "maybe", it means "from this standpoint", a distinction Jain logicians were explicit about and which their opponents were repeatedly accused of ignoring.

The doctrine had a polemical use, and Jain philosophers deployed it against rival schools by arguing that their disagreements arose from each absolutising a single standpoint: the permanence emphasised by Vedanta and the impermanence emphasised by Buddhism are both true of a thing considered under different aspects. Opponents replied, from Dharmakirti onward, that the position is either trivial or self-refuting, since the claim that all claims are one-sided is itself a claim; Jain logicians answered that their doctrine is stated with the same qualification and applied to itself consistently. In the modern period anekantavada has been presented, by Gandhi among others and by many twentieth-century Jain writers, as a resource for religious tolerance and intellectual humility, a development of the doctrine into a social ethic rather than a straightforward statement of its classical use.

The objection that syadvada refutes itself, noted briefly elsewhere in this collection, was pressed by a long line of non-Jain Indian philosophers, and Jain logicians developed an equally sophisticated set of replies over centuries of debate.

The core of the objection, developed by Buddhist logicians including Dharmakirti, is that the claim "every assertion is only relatively true" is itself asserted absolutely, so the doctrine either exempts itself from its own rule, which is inconsistent, or qualifies itself in turn, generating an infinite regress that never reaches a stable assertion. A further charge held that a single subject cannot coherently be said to both exist and not exist in the same respect, so the syat-qualified assertions of the saptabhangi either collapse into contradiction or fail to say anything determinate.

Jain philosophers, most systematically Haribhadra in the eighth century and Hemachandra in the twelfth, answered that the doctrine does not claim a thing both exists and does not exist in the same respect: existence is asserted from the standpoint of the thing's own substance, form, place and time, and non-existence from every other substance, form, place and time it is not; a pot exists as a pot, made of clay, here, now, and does not exist as a cloth or gold or elsewhere, an ordinary distinction stated with unusual explicitness rather than a violation of non-contradiction. On the regress charge, they held that "in some respect" is a formal marker applied consistently at every level rather than an admission of doubt requiring further qualification, a reply that satisfied Jain logicians without persuading their opponents, and the argument continued, largely unresolved, for the rest of the classical Indian philosophical period.