Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 856

RE-INCARNATION.
835
wasted their opportunity and gambled away their prospects dread it as an unrelenting foe.
Death, then, is the gateway to re-birth, though full of pain and suffering both in the closing moments of life as well as in the circumstances surrounding the reappearance of the soul in another form. The conquest of death, therefore, can only mean an escape from this liability to re-birth, i.e., the cycle of transmigration. This amounts to saying that immortality is the nature of pure spirit and is enjoyed by those alone who rid themselves of all traces of material impurity. It follows from this that the idea of physical immortality is a fallacy of reason pure and simple.
The same conclusion is to be reached from the physical side of the problem, where death means not the separation of spirit and matter-for that would end in the immediate deification of the soul--but a readjustment of form, or type, of their union, consequent on the changes incessantly taking place in the kârmâna sarára.
Death may be said to occur either in the fulness of time, or prematurely, as the result of an accident or from certain forms of disease. The former of these is due to internal causation, and arises from the exhaustion of the force of longevity (ayuh karma), while the latter is the result of the separation of the body of gross matter from the two inner bodies of the soul as the effect of causes external to them. So far as the force of longevity, i.e., the ayuh karma, is concerned, it is the term, or duration, of a particular form of the kârmâņa sarira, and therefore, must come to an