How is this paradise to be reached?  By right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, called the three jewels, a phrase familiar to Buddhism.  The right faith is complete confidence in Mahavira and his teaching.  Right knowledge is correct theology as outlined above.  Knowledge is of five degrees of which the highest is called Kevalam or omniscience.  This sounds ambitious, but the special method of reasoning favoured by the Jains is the modest Syadvada[258] or doctrine of may-be, which holds that you can (1) affirm the existence of a thing from one point of view, (2) deny it from another, and (3) affirm both existence and non-existence with reference to it at different times.  If (4) you should think of affirming existence and non-existence at the same time and from the same point of view, you must say that the thing cannot be spoken of.  The essence of the doctrine, so far as one can disentangle it from scholastic terminology, seems just, for it amounts to this, that as to matters of experience it is impossible to formulate the whole and complete truth, and as to matters which transcend experience language is inadequate:  also that Being is associated with production, continuation and destruction.  This doctrine is called anekanta-vada, meaning that Being is not one and absolute as the Upanishads assert:  matter is permanent, but changes its shape, and its other accidents.  Thus in many points the Jains adopt the common sense and prima facie point of view.  But the doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma are also admitted as obvious propositions, and though the fortunes and struggles of the embodied soul are described in materialistic terms, happiness is never placed in material well-being but in liberation from the material universe.

We cannot be sure that the existing Jain scriptures present these doctrines in their original form, but the full acceptance of metempsychosis, the animistic belief that plants, particles of earth and water have souls and the materialistic phraseology (from which the widely different speculations of the Upanishads are by no means free) agree with what we know of Indian thought about 550 B.C.  Jainism like Buddhism ignores the efficacy of ceremonies and the powers of priests, but it bears even fewer signs than Buddhism of being in its origin a protestant or hostile movement.  The intellectual atmosphere seems other than that of the Upanishads, but it is very nearly that of the Sankhya philosophy, which also recognizes an infinity of individual souls radically distinct from matter and capable of attaining bliss only by isolation from matter.  Of the origin of that important school we know nothing, but it differs from Jainism chiefly in the greater elaboration of its psychological and evolutionary theories and in the elimination of some materialistic ideas.  Possibly the same region and climate of opinion gave birth to two doctrines, one simple and practical, inasmuch as it found its principal expression in a religious order, the other more intellectual and scholastic and, at least in the form in which we read it, later[259].