Gandharavada

SR No.: 006739
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Esther A Solomon
Publisher: Gujarat Vidyasabha
Publication Year: 1966
Total Pages: 400
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 18 MB

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receptacles (āśraya), so the support or the receptacle of the food also has the peculiar capability or efficiency of transforming it differently. Karma, similarly, has the energy or capability to undergo an auspicious or inauspicious transformation on resorting to a jīva with an auspicious or inauspicious adhyavasāya (resolution); and the supporting jīva too has the capability to bind karman and to transform it into auspicious or inauspicious i.e. into punya (merit) or pápa (sin) (1944).
This example cannot be stretched to the extremest possible end because it can only prove that some jīvas can transform karman into auspicious (subha) and other jivas can transform karma into inauspicious (aśubha) but it cannot be said that one and the same jiva has the capability to produce in karman both subha and aśubha transformations. Another example can be given for this. Even in the same body, the same food immediately undergoes modifications both substantial and unsubstantial, good and foul. It is well known that our body turns the food eaten into substantial things like juices, blood, flesh and into foul things like urine, faeces. So the jīva can transform the karman it has bound into śubha or aśubha in accordance with its own modifications or adhyavasāya--śubha or aśubha (1945).
It is easy to see that subha karman is punya and aśubha karman, pāpa. But it remains to be seen as to which of the types of karma-bondage are subha and which aśubha. Comfortgiving (sātavedaniya), right belief (samyaktva, a particular state of purity of the mithyātva-pudgala), laughing, male sex, rati (improper and confirmed prejudicial liking), good quantum of life (äyu), good name (náman), good lineage (gotra), —these types are called punya. In the subha-ayu (quantum of life) are included deva (god), manuşya (man) and tiryañca (lower beings), that is to say, hellish beings are excluded. Subha-nāma includes 37 types, viz, devadvika i. e. devagati and devānupūrvī, yaśaḥ-kirti (fame), tirthakara (potency of revealing truth and establishing religious community), etc.. Subha-gotra means high lineage. These 46 types being auspicious are punya and the remaining are pāpa. Some ācāryas regard all the sub-types of inohaniya-karman as
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