Complexity: The Jain Fable of the Elephant
Plato, who was obsessed with universals, wrote in his Republic, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” I could elaborate this by suggesting that there are two ways I can be sure I am wrong. One is to assert that a particular thing is certainly true. The other is to assert that no particular thing is. It's a faith position, impossible to prove, but my most certain belief is in the uncertainty of belief.
This recalls the parable of the blind men and the elephant, retold in many forms for millennia. The earliest version comes from India about 500 BCE. Retold over the centuries by Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sufi, and Baha'i teachers, it was popularized in 19th-century America by John Godfrey Saxe, a poet remembered today chiefly for his poem about it--explicitly connected to theology.
In Saxe's poem, six blind Hindu men "to learning much inclined" examine an elephant. The first touches the elephant's side and says it's like a wall, the second a tusk and says it's like spear, the third the squirming trunk and says it's like a snake, the fourth a leg and says it's like a tree, the sixth an ear and says it's like a fan. and the sixth the tail and says it's like a rope. When they share their insights, each one is outraged by the stubborn wrong-headedness of the others.
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
The trouble is that their observations are simple, but the elephant is complex. Their wisdom is genuine but piecemeal. The vast, complex, and ambiguous universe is like the elephant, a totality to which we are blind. Is an elementary "particle" more like a wave, or even a vibrating string?
All of the descriptions of the elephant are analogous. They tell what it resembles--what it is simultaneously like and unlike, not what it is. Analogies tend only to enlarge our understanding of things already known. They are COIK, clear only if known. A seventh blind man who heard the elephant described as a wall-spear-snake-tree-fan-rope might be less inclined to be dogmatic, but this description would still paint a very confusing picture of the beast.
Language works well enough when we stand in the same place--literally or figuratively--with a common term for a shared experience (for instance, if we are sighted and point to a physical elephant), but, beyond that, language becomes progressively unmoored from experience, not only with respect to theology, but also in more mundane situations. Suppose I have never eaten eggplant and ask you what it tastes like. Language communicates very well your attitude toward a food, whether you like it and in what recipes. You might also compare the taste of eggplant to foods I have eaten such as avocado or zucchini, description by analogy again. But the actual flavor--the thing-itself as it impacts my tongue--remains elusive. You might describe a favorite food that I find repulsive. At best, you share with me a part of the flavor-elephant, a tusk and leg abstracted from a fullness I can only experience by raising a fork.
Writing in an era when poetry was valued for moral clarity, not ambiguity, Saxe pounds home his moral in the closing stanza:
So, oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
tread on in utter ignorance,
Of what each other mean,
and prate about the elephant,
Not one of them has seen!
Everyone agrees that theological statements describe a unseen God using words of the marketplace stretched beyond their concrete and obvious meanings, and Saxe ridicules arguments that apply the principle of non-contradiction to conclude that, since a fan, a wall, and a rope are dissimilar things, only one of them can describe an elephant. If one is true, the others must be false. This kind of thinking imprisons God (or a complex universe) in a box of human analogy. If we construct an extended analogy to human strength, name it omnipotence, and (thinking in terms of a strongman lifting a stone) ask whether X is too heavy to lift or not--or if it is a particle, wave, or string, a wall, fan, or rope--the answer of a sighted person seeing the entire elephant may be an inclusive yes.
The parable of the blind men and the elephant illustrates a central doctrine of Jainism, anekantavada, which literally translates 'not-one-sided-theory' or 'many-sidedness.' English words for this might be ambiguity or complexity, and it expresses the teaching of Mahavira, the founder of current Jainism (6th century BCE), that no verbal formulation captures the truth. An enlightened Jain, the equivalent of a living Buddha, is understood to attain a state of "omniscience" from which all expressions of truth are seen to be incomplete. Statements can only be judged as true or false in context; therefore, an appropriate response to any metaphysical generalization is a qualified yes-and-no.
This is not a doctrine of skepticism or pure relativism. Essential Jain beliefs such as nonviolence, non-attachment, samsara. and karma still approximate the truth closely enough to be binding, but the doctrine does contradict the Western emphasis on "belief" in the sense of saying "I believe" before strings of words, a creed-based orthodoxy. As Saxe's poem suggests, anekantavada questions purely theoretical argument in theology, situating theological language in contextualized individual experience.
Jainism is one of the world's oldest practiced religions. According to Jain traditions, its teachings are eternal and were re-established within our current time-cycle millions of years ago by Rishabhanatha, who was five thousand feet tall. Secular Indian historians trace the religion to early in the first millennium BCE, centuries before Mahavira, who was a contemporary of the Buddha. In the form that exists today, Jainism emerged during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, when lasting foundations of religion and philosophy were being laid from Greece to China, a time when Buddhism and Hinduism were also emerging in India.
The three traditions share a common world-view, quite different from the Abrahamic tradition. The Indian world is not a God-created place where people live once and face moral judgement. Instead, it is eternal and cyclic, a place where we die and are reborn perhaps millions of times, possibly as gods or animals, the quality of our incarnations being determined by a law of cause and effect called karma. Life is transitory and unsatisfying (not to speak of monotonous), so the immediate goal of religious practice is to achieve a better rebirth--the ultimate goal to escape the cycle of death and rebirth altogether.
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism agree on the problem, but for fifteen hundred years have differed on details of the solution, especially the nature of the soul, which Jains see through a lens of anekantavada. All three agree that impermanent things are in an important sense illusions, not real, but Hindus understand the inner soul--the atman or Self--to be eternal and identical to Brahman, the eternal world-soul. Thus, not only is the soul real; it is ultimate reality.
The Buddha was raised in this tradition, but his teachings take impermanence a step farther, arguing that, since the experience of the self is constantly changing, there can be no substantive, permanent soul. This is the doctrine of anatman, or no-soul. The reincarnated soul is constantly changing--is an amalgam of parts, not a unitary thing--and thus not real.
Anekantavada answers this either-or with a both-and. True, the reincarnated soul is constantly changing, so its form at any given time is not real. But, because it is constantly changing, there must be an identity remaining constant through these changes, and that is real. As substance it is transitory, but as process it is eternal. In Jain cosmology, the world is a conglomeration of souls in process, so even rocks and trees incorporate souls that are eternal even as they change.
We don't have to accept Mahavira's animist cosmology to see the paradox of change vs. identity. It was debated by pre-Socratic philosophers at about the same time in Greece: Zeno argued that a flying arrow is at only one place at at any given moment, so motion is impossible; Heraclitus took a contrary position that, because things are constantly changing, "no man ever steps in the same river twice." Not only is it a different river, but a different man. Both fail to describe our many-sided experience of things that change while somehow remaining themselves.
A classic instance is the ship of Theseus, a paradox described in Plutarch's Lives: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians . . . for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. Many-sidedness, subsumes the paradox. With reference to substance, if all the boards have been replaced, it is a different ship, but with reference to process, it is a one and the same continuity.
Life is full of instances calling for a many-sided solution. Does a hundred-year-old birth-Catholic belong to the church she was baptized in, given that most of its members and all of its leadership have died. I recall Kindergarten, but am I the kid who traced letters there? Mentally and physically, all of my planks have been replaced, molecules excreted, cells regenerated, size and shape altered. Memory is my only real connection to five-year-old Billy, and research suggests that longer-term memories are memories of remembering, replicas like Theseus' ship.
Anekantavada is a needed solution to these paradoxes of identity because, while I am spectacularly different from five-year-old Billy, on any two consecutive days I remain apparently the same. There was no clear demarcation, no hour when a new myself sprang into being. Am I one person or many? The most accurate answer to this is yes.
Many-sidedness settles theological questions that have bedeviled Christianity. Supposing that none of us has gotten our hands on all the parts of the elephant, I propose universal answers to great, divisive questions:
Q: Is human nature good or evil? A: Obviously.
Q: Predestination or free will? A: Of course.
Q: By faith or by works? A. By all means.
Q: One path or many? A: Absolutely.
Q: The meaning of life? A: Yes.
Q. One true religion? A. Are you kidding?
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