Jaina Theory of Knowing and Omniscience: Ramifications for Recognising Mind and Its Identity

Abstract

Jaina concern with epistemological issues has two main functions: (i) provide basis for an intelligible discourse on matters of common, everyday experience; (ii) demarcate this area from what constitutes the knowledge of the ‘ultimates’ of reality. In other words, what is it that we know, and how do we know what we believe we have come to know? These are, of course, standard epistemological questions in pramāṇavāda , theories of knowledge, which most schools in Indian philosophy subscribe to in one form or another, even if they end up demolishing the same. The Jainas also subscribed to pramāṇavāda ; but at some point, their theories seek to transcend the bounds of ordinary sensory and for that matter even rational knowledge ( considered as parokṣajñāna ). They believed in the possibility of direct intuition ( pratyakṣa ), where consciousness “touches” the objects and their forms (universals). Pratyakṣa is curiously used for direct knowing, in a sense stronger than in Nyāya (via Matilal)’s direct realism. Thus, it is possible for beings to develop deeper insights ( dṛṣṭi ) by means of perfecting the instruments of knowing, working through universals ( sāmānya, jāti ,) and broader patterns (gestalts, adṛṣṭa ) in the minds encounter with that which is real, in order to attain kevala sarvajña (the solitary all-knowing state or omniscience). This is not unlike Descartes’ view that in the ‘clear light of mind’, the pure ideas are none other than Ideas in God’s Mind (i.e. their identity is absolute; though God is absent in Jainism). Or that the “I-am” ( ahaṃartha ) is ultimately the knowing consciousness of the jīvātman (‘soul-self’), which makes the subject aware of the object grasped in the act of cognition, and thus makes it the act of acquiring become knowledge; this knowing is independent from the act of knowing, and is non-negotiable.