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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
156
Atman and Moksa
as an independent ontological reality. It is simply a projection by the human mind, of a fictitious entity which is required for the explanation of psychological workings. The Madhyamikas being nihilists did not admit the existence of the Self as a real entity. They reduced it to a fiction and regarded it to be true only conventionally, and for practical purposes. They denied the Self as a metaphysical and onto. logical reality. Suzuki makes the same idea still more clear in his following passage — “As there is no transcendent agent in our soul-life, so there is no real, eternal existence of individuals as individuals, but a system of different attributes, which, when the force of Karma is exhausted, cease to subsist. Individual existences cannot be real by their inherent nature, but they are illusory, and will never remain permanent as such, for they are constantly becoming, and have no selfhood though they may appear to our particularising senses on account of our subjective ignorance. They are in reality s'ünya and anāt. man, they are empty and void of ātman."1 Thus Suzuki continues in the same vein and further writes -- "In as much as all beings are transient and empty in their inherent being, they cannot logically be said to be in possession of Self - essence which defies the law of causation. All things are mutually conditioning and limiting and apart from their relativity they are non-existent and cannot be known by us. Therefore, says Nāgārjuna “If substance be different from attribute, it is then beyond all
1 Suzuki D. T. : Outlines of Mahāyāna Buddhism, p. 170.
For Private And Personal
| SR No. | 020053 |
| Book Title | tman_and_moksa |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | G N Joshi |
| Publisher | Gujarat University |
| Publication Year | 1965 |
| Total Pages | 901 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 12 MB |