Heritage of the Last Arhat Mahavira

SR No.: 001653
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Charlotte Krause
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith
Total Pages: 32
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Religion, & Devotion
File Size: 3 MB

Page 18

14
said to have fulfilled its nobel task in the ideal way claimed before, if the individual would feel the apparent sacrifice to be an infringement on its happiness. In reality, however, both the sides are in perfect equilibrium, for there are deliberations which not only reconcile the individual with that so-called “sacrifice", but make it realize that it is, on the contrary, benefitted by it, and that this benefit by far outweighs the apparent disadvantage.
First of all, the motivation of the very “sacrifice” is as we saw, an egotistic one : for if the individual submits to those restrictions, it does so in order to avoid the binding of unfavourable Karma, and therewith the storing up of latent suffering ; and if it recurs to those actions of positive altruism, it does so in order to bind favourable Karma, and to secure latent happiness.
And it performs both the kinds of actions, those of negative as well as those of positive altruism, with the assistance of certain of its own natural dispositions, which form part of its "conscience”. I mean those emotions of sympathy and compassion, which make us place ourselves in the situations of a suffering creatures, and suffer, as it were, with it, especiallly when we have reason to feel ourselves responsible for its sufferings, as in the case of a nightflutterer rushing into the light we allowed to burn uncovered, in our carelessness; or in the case of a bird which was starved in its cage through our forgetfulness, or in the case of a helpless deer which we killed with our own hand, in a fit of huntsman's zeal, and the sight of whose mutilated body makes us, after all, sick and miserable. It is that universal postulate which Hemacandra, the great Ācārya and teacher of King Kumārapāla of Gujrat, has expressed in that often-quoted stanza (Yogaśāstra 11,20).
आत्मवत्सर्वभूतेषु सुखदुःखे प्रियाप्रिये । चिन्तयन्नात्मनोऽनिष्टां हिंसामन्यस्य नाचरेत् ।। “In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should