Heart of Jainism

SR No.: 011099
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publication Year: 1915
Total Pages: 365
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 29 MB

Page 148

ix. Lobha.
Kaṣāya.
THE NINE CATEGORIES OF
them in austerity, and thus get ahead of them on the path to liberation; and so, yielding to temptation, he once added an extra fast to the days they had agreed to observe and kept it on the quiet without telling his colleagues. His friends were deeply grieved when they discovered the deceitful way they had been outdone, but Mallinātha suffered also; for though he had acquired so much merit that it automatically made him a Tīrthankara, the spiritual māyā he had indulged in turned him into a female one.1
The Jaina have many legends that show the evils of Lobha or avarice, the ninth kind of sin. Thus, a great king, Subhūma, lost his kingdom through greed and was drowned in the sea; and it was through avarice again that a certain merchant prince lost all his millions and died without a pie. Indeed the proverb Lobha papanum mūļa, 'avarice is the root of sin', is current not amongst Jaina only but among all Indians.2
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We now come to an analysis of these four sins (anger, conceit, intrigue and greed), together called Kaṣāya, which is of the first importance to our sympathetic understanding of the strength of Jainism. The value of Jaina philosophy lies not only in the fact that it, unlike Hinduism, has correlated ethical teaching with its metaphysical system, but also in the amazing knowledge of human nature which its ethics display. Very often Jaina divide and subdivide a subject in such a way as to throw no fresh light on it, but in the subdivisions of these four faults (which they rightly and profoundly regard as sister sins) they have seized on an essential truth, that the length of time a sin is indulged in affects the nature of the sin; for sins grow worse through long keeping.
1 Digambara of course do not believe this, as they hold that no woman can ever be a Tirthankara.
2 It is interesting to compare with this the Christian saying: 'The love of money is the root of all evil.'
3 Compare again: 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath'; for the anger which is kept overnight has grown deadly by the morning.