Anekāntavāda Applications in Modern Conflict, Spiritual Wisdom for 2025

Anekāntavāda: The Ancient Key the World Might Not Be Searching For But Deeply Needs Right Now

The world is loud right now.

Everyone has an opinion. Everyone is right. Everyone else is wrong.

We scroll, we shout, we cancel, we defend. And somewhere in the noise, the possibility of meeting each other in truth and kindness gets often lost for so many.

But what if there was an ancient philosophy, over two thousand years old, that whispered a different way? That helped us re-learn that tolerance, respect, empathy and compassion are still worthy of being practiced.

Enter anekāntavāda.

What is Anekāntavāda?

Rooted in Jain philosophy, anekāntavāda literally means “many-sidedness” or “non-absolutism.”

As a “non-absolutist” myself when I came up with this word the other day and started reading about it I really wanted to talk more of it.

It is all about: reality being vast.

No single viewpoint…yours, mine, or anyone else’s can ever capture the w h o l e. Each of us holds only a fragment of truth, like blind men describing an elephant: one touches the leg and calls it a tree, another feels the trunk and insists it’s a snake. Both are right. And both are incomplete.

And according to my research this story also appears in 2nd millennium Sufi and Baháʼí Faith lore. The tale later became well known in Europe, with 19th-century American poet John Godfrey Saxe creating his own version as a poem, with a final verse that explains that the elephant is a metaphor for God, and the various blind men represent religions that disagree on something no one has fully experienced. Read more about it here.

Why It Matters Now

Our global landscape is cracked open by polarization. Politics, religion, health, identity, even what we consider “facts.” We are desperate for certainty, but certainty often arrives dressed as division.

Anekāntavāda invites us to breathe. To say: perhaps there’s more than one way to see this. It doesn’t mean all ideas are equal. It doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as absolute truth. What it does mean is that truth is too big, too mysterious, to belong to one person, one nation, one algorithm.

This shift from I am right to I hold a piece of the picture I suspect is the medicine the world might be needing.

Because I don’t know about you but I am growing tired of hate based on ignorance, lack of emphaty and absolutism. I’m just tired of being bombarded with hate in general. Low key it’s one of the reasons I’m not as candid or present on social media.

Here is How to Practice Anekāntavāda in Daily Life

We don’t need to be Jain monks to practice this philosophy. It can unfold quietly, in small acts:

• Listening to understand rather than listening to argue.

• Asking “what am I missing?” before declaring judgment.

• Honoring multiple perspectives even when they make us uncomfortable.

• Holding humility in conversations, because truth is larger than ego.

Imagine applying this in politics, families or international relations. Imagine conversations where opposing sides pause to say: You too carry a truth I cannot see alone.

The world would not suddenly become soft or simple. But it might become more spacious. More humane.

And hey this doesn’t mean I don’t have convictions, of course i do, but I don’t let my opinions to drive me into hurting others. Never. Because you can stay true to yourself and what’s important while remembering we all deserve respect, we all deserve kindness.

The Key We’ve Forgotten

Anekāntavāda is not just a philosophy it’s a reminder a way of living. That we are guests in a mysterious universe, living g different realities inside a shared timeline, each of us carrying a shard of the mirror. Alone, our reflection is incomplete. Together, the mosaic becomes closer to whole (but not quite fully complete either).

And maybe, in times of global fracture, that mosaic-making metaphor is exactly what the world is asking us to embody.

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