Anekāntavāda - I

Jainism in its treatment of Being or Existence adopts Anekāntavāda. An adequate description of Anekāntavāda requires much space and a great deal of philosophical insight. This article is the first one in the series and here I use the famous story of 'An elephant and six blinds'

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. They had never seen or heard about elephant. One day, a king with an elephant happened to visit their village. The blind men went to see the animal. They happened, one after the other, to touch the trunk, tusk,ear,foot,stomach and tail respectively, of the elephant and returned home with the idea conceived by that touch as to be the form of the animal.

At home, they stared discussing the creature they had seen. To the one who touched the trunk , it was like a tree branch. To the one who touched the tusk, it was like a horn. And to others it was like a hand-fan (ear), a pillar (leg),a big jar(stomach) and a rope(tail). They started to quarrel.

Each one was confident of his statement and regarded that of the other as entirely wrong. A man passing by, heard them, and said : " Brothers, you all are fighting in vain . Each of you is correct from a certain point of view. You have touched different parts of an elephant and those parts are like what each of you describe. But the elephant as a whole has all the attributes that you describe." This resolved the conflict.

Jainism does not take one sided view; whatever it asserts it does so from a certain point of view."Peace for all" is its motto. It does not like to fight with any religion. It does not like to see various religions in discord with one another.The theory of every religion is true from a certain point of view and in a certain aspect.

Reality has infinite attributes and infinite conditions or aspects.