Mahavir Jayanti Invoking the philosophy

Anekanta is a Jaina concept built on the idea that truth is multidimensional.Truth is relative to time, space, context and so many other factors. What may be true for you at this moment may not be true for me. One idea can be perceived in different ways by different people. Like our visualisation of Krishna: a child, a lover, a friend, a god. The 24th tirthankara of the Jainas, Mahavira found in his 12-year-long penance that every living being had something good in him. He said every faith has some truth in it. Absolute Truth or the whole truth is inexpressible in its entirety because of the limited capacity of words. The idea by itself is not the singular discovery of the Jainas. The Rig Veda verse: Ekam sat bahuda vadanti vipraha —‘one truth, different people express it in different ways’, is an example. The Jainas say that the body is impermanent while the soul is permanent. And creation and destruction are taking place constantly. Can opposites coexist? Do sun and shade not coexist? How do you understand beauty, if you did not know something that is not beautiful?The idea that opposites can coexist opens many doors. At the social level, it shows the way to peaceful coexistence. Even those who hold diametrically opposite views can still be true and do not challenge your truth. Live and let live. At the poetic level, this became a metaphor for poetry. Anandavardhana uses examples of Prakrit poetry to illustrate the idea of dwani or suggestion in poetry. The very first verse in which he demonstrates how the meaning is actually quite different from the intent is taken from Hala’s Gathasaptashati, a first century work in Prakrit, and Hala was believed to be a Jaina. The verse describes a nayika decorating a clearing which she feels is very good for her rendezvous, when who should enter but a monk. She is not able to tell the monk to go and does not want him to stay either. So she tells him, “Of course you may stay, but do you know that a tiger mauled a deer by the river yesterday.”She hopes the monk will fear this eventuality. Suggestions made way for symbols, like the lotus, the bee, the sugarcane and so on…the symbols are common to the Indian ethos — so, to say they are only Jaina symbols would not be correct. The sugarcane symbolises the Ikshvaku vamsa, lineage, for example; both Rama of the Vedic tradition and Rishabha, the first tirthankara, are said to belong to it. Some proper names too are common, but then we are talking of times when there were no ‘isms’ and the movement between faiths was porous and intellectual. As a rich tapestry of symbols,poetry and prayer sought to explain life, the single pervading thought was: Akashat patitam toyam yatha gachati sagaram….Just as drops of rain gather up to fill the ocean so do all our prayers make for the divine, whether he is Madhava, Keshava or the Absolute Truth. ■