Anekantavada

The doctrine

The term means non-one-sidedness. Its claim is not that everything is relative or that nothing can be known, but that any real thing has infinite aspects, while any assertion picks out one of them. A statement is therefore true within the standpoint from which it is made, and becomes false only when its standpoint is forgotten and it is asserted as the whole account.

The classic illustration is the group of blind men describing an elephant: the one holding the trunk, the one holding the leg and the one holding the ear each report accurately, and each is wrong to think their report exhaustive. The image is old and is used in Buddhist sources too, but Jain writers made it carry a formal doctrine.

Related instruments

Anekantavada is worked out through two further devices. Nayavada is the analysis of standpoints — the enumeration of the perspectives from which a thing may be described, such as its substance, its qualities or its momentary state. Syadvada is the formal expression, in which a claim is qualified with syat, "in some respect", and reality is described through a sevenfold scheme of conditional predication.

Together these gave Jain philosophy a distinctive method in the classical period, when Buddhist, Hindu and Jain schools argued over the nature of substance and change. Jain writers used anekantavada to argue that permanence and impermanence, which their opponents treated as exclusive, are both true of the same thing under different aspects.

Assessment and modern use

Opponents pressed the obvious objection: if every claim is conditional, is the doctrine of anekantavada itself conditional, and if so why accept it? Jain writers, notably Samantabhadra and Haribhadra, treated this at length. The doctrine has also been read in modern times as an argument for religious tolerance, and Jain writers have advanced it as such — though its original setting is technical philosophy rather than interfaith relations, and the transfer is a modern one.