Anekantavada (many-sidedness of truth)

Anekantavada means non-one-sidedness, and it is the Jain claim that reality has infinite aspects while any statement can capture only one standpoint at a time. The best-known illustration, the blind men describing an elephant as a pillar, a rope, a fan and a wall, appears in Jain sources as well as Buddhist and later Sufi ones, and Jain writers use it to make a specific point: each description is accurate and none is complete, and the error lies in the claim to completeness rather than in the observation.

Two subsidiary doctrines give it precision.

Nayavada is the analysis of standpoints. A statement is made from a perspective, substantial or modal, general or particular, and identifying the perspective is part of evaluating the statement. A pot is clay from one standpoint and a pot from another; both are true and they are not the same claim.

Syadvada is the doctrine of conditional predication, which prefixes assertions with syat, in some respect. It generates a sevenfold scheme: in some respect a thing is; in some respect it is not; in some respect it is and is not; in some respect it is indescribable; and the three combinations of the fourth with the first three. The apparatus looks scholastic and is: it is a formal device for keeping the qualification visible.

The doctrine is emphatically not relativism. Jainism holds that some claims are true and others false, that its own account of soul, karma and liberation is correct, and that an omniscient being, a kevalin, perceives all aspects of all things simultaneously. Anekantavada describes the limits of non-omniscient knowledge and of language, not the absence of truth.

Jain writers have long presented anekantavada as the intellectual application of ahimsa. To assert one's own view as the whole truth is to do violence to the partial truth in another's, and the dogmatic insistence that produces sectarian conflict is on this account a species of harm. The connection is explicit in the tradition and is not a modern gloss, though modern Jain apologists have emphasised it heavily.

In practice Jain philosophers used the doctrine as a method of engagement. Where Buddhist opponents held everything to be momentary and Vedantins held reality to be permanent, Jain writers argued that substance is permanent while its modes change, so both schools had seized one aspect and denied the other. This let them position Jainism as the comprehensive account and their rivals as partial, which is a strong claim rather than a modest one, and their opponents said so.

The standard objections came quickly. Buddhist and Nyaya logicians argued that the sevenfold scheme either collapses into contradiction or is trivial, since once every assertion is qualified by respect, nothing is being denied at all. Shankara dismissed it as incoherent. Jain replies distinguish contradictory predicates asserted of the same aspect, which remain forbidden, from predicates asserted of different aspects, which do not conflict.

The comparative reach is worth noting and worth handling carefully. The Buddhist doctrine of two truths and the Buddha's refusal to answer certain metaphysical questions address a related difficulty about the fit between language and reality, but they do so by ranking or setting aside claims rather than by combining them. Modern writers have compared anekantavada to pluralism and to the philosophy of science, and Gandhi cited it in support of tolerance. Those readings are legitimate extensions rather than statements of the classical doctrine, which was developed to win philosophical arguments as much as to end them.