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Abstract

This dissertation is a close study of how one representative premodern South Asian philosopher conceptualizes religious differences, navigates disagreements, seeks agreement with others, and formulates both ontological and religious identity. The eminent Śvetāmbara figure of Haribhadrasūri is standardly acknowledged as a watershed for the participation of Jain thought in Sanskrit discourse in the late first millennium CE. However, this dissertation is the first constructive attempt in English to delineate the contours of his wide-ranging philosophical program in detail with a focus on the connection between his seminal doxographical efforts and his authoritative treatment of the classical Jain theory of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda). Tying together the various texts in my archive, I claim, is a concern to construct identity and agreement in tandem with difference and disagreement. In chapter 1, I argue that the primary function of Haribhadra’s most famous work, the Compendium of Six Viewpoints (Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya), is to differentiate the various doctrinal systems within a common comparative frame and formulate the identity of Haribhadra’s own tradition amongst them. Chapter 2 turns to Haribhadra’s proposals for the rational adjudication of doctrinal disagreements, starting with his most quoted essay, the Settlement with Popular Principles (Lokatattvanirṇaya), which articulates the importance of critical reasoning as characterized by the avoidance of partiality toward one’s own tradition. The nature of critical reasoning is further elaborated in his exposition of the rules for rational debate across doctrinal difference as codified in the Buddhist Introduction to Logic (Nyāyapraveśa), wherein partiality is precluded by the demand that debaters come to terms with one another upon common ground. I show that Haribhadra is especially concerned to expose how the various identitarian affiliations of debaters dictate irreconcilable presuppositions that issue in argumentative stalemate. It therefore becomes necessary for him to ground his own constructive arguments in appeals to universally-shared common sense; and this, as I argue in chapter 3, is just what he does in his philosophical magnum opus, the Victory-Flag of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntajayapatākā). The basic thesis of this treatise, that all things admit of contrary predicates without contradiction, has often been deemed paradoxical; but Haribhadra presents it as presupposed by everyday activity and by the various philosophical doctrines despite their one-sided claims, and thus commonly accepted by all people whether they admit it or not. This non-one-sidedness becomes particularly consequential when applied to issues of personal identity and the path to liberation, and chapter 4 shows that what is at most basically at stake in Haribhadra’s non-one-sided treatment of these issues is the very possibility of intentional action and awareness at all. I conclude with brief reflections upon the various popular modern interpretations of anekāntavāda as religious pluralism, inclusivism, toleration, or intellectual ahiṃsā (nonviolence), indicating how some of their features are captured and some of their pitfalls avoided by Haribhadra’s more rigorously granular model of the negotiation of identity through engagement with particular differences.

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