अनेकान्तवाद

Anekantavada

The doctrine that reality has many aspects and that any single account of it is partial — an epistemology that works as an ethic of argument.

Anekantavada holds that a thing has innumerable aspects, that any statement about it is made from some standpoint, and that no standpoint exhausts it. It is not relativism: the tradition is clear that some statements are false. It is a claim that a true statement is true from where it is made, and that treating a partial truth as the whole is the characteristic philosophical error.

The illustration everyone reaches for is the elephant and the blind men, each describing the part they hold. The illustration is older than Jainism and is used in other traditions to different ends; what Jain philosophy adds is the machinery. Naya is the analysis of standpoints — the substance-view and the mode-view, the general and the particular — and syadvada is the practice of marking every assertion with the standpoint it holds from.

Syadvada is often given as the sevenfold predication: from some standpoint a thing is; from some standpoint it is not; from some standpoint it both is and is not; from some standpoint it is inexpressible; and the three combinations of the fourth with the first three. The word syat is the qualifier, and it is closer to "in a certain respect" than to "perhaps". Translating it as "maybe" turns a precise instrument into a shrug, which is the commonest mistranslation in the literature.

The consequence is visible in how Jain philosophers write. An opponent’s position is stated at full strength, from the standpoint that makes it true, before it is answered — because on this account the opponent is not simply wrong but partially right, and saying which part is the actual work.