Why Must There Be an Omniscient in Jainism?

5 WHY MUST THERE BE AN OMNISCIENT IN JAINISM? Sin Fujinaga 1. It is a well-known fact that the Jains deny the existence of God as a creator of this universe while the Hindus admit such existence. According to Jainism this universe has no beginning and no end, so no being has created it. On the other hand, the Jains are very eager to establish the existence of an omniscient person. Such a person is denied in the Hindu tradition. The Jain saviors or tirthaÅkaras are sometimes called bhagavan, a Lord. This word does not indicate a creator but rather means a respected person with all-pervading knowledge. Generally speaking, the omniscience of the tirthaÅkaras is such that they grasp each and every thing of the universe not only in the present time, but in the past and the future also. The view on the omniscience of tirthaÅkaras, however, is not ubiquitous in the Jaina tradition. Kundakunda remarks, “From the practical point of view an omniscient Lord perceives and knows all, while from the real point of view he perceives and knows his own soul.”1 Buddhism, another non-Hindu school of Indian philosophy, maintains that the founder Buddha is omniscient. In the Pali canon, the Buddha is sometimes described with the word savvaññu or sabbavid, both of which mean omniscient.2 But he is also said to recognize only the religious truth of dharma, more precisely, the four noble truths, caturaryasatya. This means that the omniscient Buddha does not need to know details of matters such as the number of insects in this world. Opposed to these two traditions, the Hindu schools do not admit any kind of omniscient person. Especially the MimaÅsakas fiercely attack the notion of omniscience because for them the (non-personal) Vedas are the ultimate authority on things in this universe. In the history of Indian philosophy, these three schools, that is, the Jains, the Buddhists, and the MimaÅsakas attack each other and proclaim their own views on omniscience. Historically speaking, a Jain philosopher, Samantabhadra who must have lived in the sixth century of CE, is the first person who tried to establish the existence of an omniscient person by using the method of inference (anumana).3 From the MimaÅsaka side, Kumarila attacked Samantabhadra’s position in his Flokavartika, while the famous Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti 107 SIN FUJINAGA also criticized the notion of an omniscient person proclaimed by the Jain philosopher in his Pramajavarttika.4 Most of the books or papers which deal with Jain epistemology discuss omniscience at some length following the line of K. B. Pathak (1892, 1931) who must have been the first modern scholar to investigate the topic of omniscience in Jainism. Pathak showed that Kumarila attacked not only the Jain notion of omniscience but also that of the Buddhists. E. A. Solomon (1962) deals with omniscience not only in Jain literature but also in Hindu literature and Buddhist canons. Jaini (1974/2001) also discusses the omniscience of Mahavira and the Buddha. Singh (1974) is the only book in English whose main topic is omniscience in Jainism. But he does not refer to the reason why there must be an omniscient in Jainism. The second volume of Jain (1994) contains some discussion on the omniscient in Jainism as well as Buddhism. However, even in this book, we cannot find any argument about the necessity of the all-knowing person. Readers of this volume will find that Olle Qvarnström discusses how the Jain philosopher Haribhadra attacked Kumarila’s notion of omniscience.5 In this chapter we shall see how the Jains tried to show the possibility of an all-knowing person, and we shall discuss why the Jains are so eager to establish the omniscience of the savior on the basis of some Prakrit and Sanskrit treatises such as the Rajaprasejiya, and AptamimaÅsa. 2. Before discussing the attempts to prove the existence of the omniscience in Jainism, we shall have a brief view at Jain epistemology. The Jains admit the two kinds of valid method of knowledge (pramaja): pratyaksa and paroksa. The former means direct cognition or perception and the latter includes indirect or inference, scripture. In Jain epistemology the term pratyaksa refers to the omniscience also because it grasps objects directly. It is also important to realize that in early times perception was categorized as a part of paroksa while later Jain philosophers considered it as direct cognition. Samantabhadra uses the word pratyaksa in two meanings: direct cognition including omniscience as well as perception.6 The Jain philosopher Samantabhadra tried to prove the existence of an omniscient person in his main work AptamimaÅsa, which means the examination of the reliable person. He first shows the possibility of complete annihilation of karmic matter: In some person there must be a total destruction of the spiritual deficiencies and of the physical veilings (that act as the cause of these deficiencies), for there must be a case where such destruction is most complete of all; this is just as by an employment of appropriate means it is possible to make in a physical substance a total destruction of the extraneous as well as organic impurities which it had happened to accumulate.7 It must be noted in this verse that Samantabhadra does not discuss the possibility of destruction of all the karmas but rather of those that hinder the power of ecognition (ghatikarma). 108 WHY MUST THERE BE AN OMNISCIENT IN JAINISM? In the next verse, he shows the possibility of the existence of an omniscient person by the following syllogism: “The objects that are minute, concealed or distant must be amenable to somebody’s perception, because they are amenable to inferential knowledge, similar to fire etc.”8 What Samantabhadra intends in this verse seems to be as follows: we can infer the existence of fire on a remote mountain by seeing smoke from that mountain. At the same time, this fire is directly perceived by someone else, that is a person at that spot. This assumption can be applied to any object that we cannot see directly; a germ on the skin, a pebble in someone’s fist and so on. A germ is not perceived directly by us, but by inference we know that it exists somewhere: by perceiving pus from the wound we can know that there are germs while someone can perceive it directly through a microscope. A pebble in someone’s fist is perceptible for that person and the other person can infer the existence of it by perceiving the special form of the fist. It must be also admitted, for Samantabhadra, that all things in the universe are objects of inference. Thus, they are objects of perception, that is perceived by someone. This means that there must be somebody who can recognize all things. This is the omniscient person. To formulate this argument: Whatever exists in this universe must be object of perception (pratijña). Because (whatever exists in this universe must be object of inference. And incomplete all) the object of inference must be perceived by someone (hetu). Like fire on a remote mountain (drstanta). In the strict sense, however, Samantabhadra’s argument does not establish the existence of an omniscient person. First, we must realize that all the things in this universe can be divided into two groups: that which can be perceived directly and that which cannot be perceived directly. Samantabhadra suggests only that some person may perceive that which we cannot perceive. Moreover, the person who perceives the fire is not always the same person who can perceive other things directly. It should be noticed here that this argument does not match Samantabhadra’s final purpose. He intends to demonstrate that only the tirthaÅkara is omniscient and not persons of other schools such as the Buddha in Buddhism. Therefore, Samantabhadra tries to prove his view by two sets of inference again: And such an omniscient person are you alone (because your) utterance is neither in conflict with logic nor with the scripture. For the proof of such an absence of the conflict, it is circumstance that your thoughts are never contradicted with what is well established.9 In the first syllogism Samantabhadra proclaims that only the Jain tirthaÅkara is omniscient, he who has destroyed all hindrances and recognizes all the things in this universe. The reason for this is that he preaches in accordance with logic and the scriptures. The second syllogism shows why there is no conflict between 109 SIN FUJINAGA the preachings and logic or the scriptures. It is so, because what he preaches is not denied by what is commonly admitted as authentic. With these verses, Samantabhadra has posited that only a Jain tirthaÅkara can be possessed of omniscient knowledge in the sense of knowing all the things in the universe not only in the present but even in the past as well as in the future.10 As we have seen, his attempts were not successful because he only shows that all the things are objects of inference as well as those of perception but does not show that one and the same person can perceive all the objects. Even then it remains true that he introduced the method of inference into the discussion on the omniscience. Samantabhadra must be the first person to do so not only in Jainism but also in Indian philosophy because, to our knowledge, before him no one tried to establish the existence or non-existence of the all-knowing person. Most Jain philosophers after Samantabhadra, both Fvetambaras and Digambaras, adopt the argument which Samantabhadra showed in his AptamimaÅsa, for example, Akalakka (c.720–760 CE).

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