Jain Journal 2003 01

SR No.: 520149
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publication Year: 2003
Total Pages: 58
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, India_Jain Journal, & India
File Size: 4 MB

Page 13

140
JAIN JOURNAL VOL-XXXVII, NO. 3 JAN 2003
searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. 40
Simon Blackburn has rightly noted:
The aim of all philosophy is, however, to enable us to live well, which is not to live in the hedonistic trough the world Epicureanism now suggests, after centuries of propaganda against the system. Rather, practical wisdom, attained through philosophy, is needed to attain the pleasant life, which consists in a preponderence of katastematic pleasures, capable of indefinite prolongation, over merely kinematic or volatile sensory pleasures.
41
Hemacandra in his work was merely lanpooning the Cārvāka. Svayambuddha, in his turn, sets out to refute the Carvaka system and speaks against sensual pleasures. His puritanism, however, is typical of the Jain attitude to life.
Sambhinnamati's discourse ends with a rewritten version of a popular verse attributed to the Lokāyatikas:
yāvajjivet sukha- jivet tāvat vaiṣaikaiḥ sukhaiḥ /
na tämyed dharma-kāryāya dharmādharmaphala- kva tat || 42
In its earliest known form the verse runs as follows:
yāvaj jiva- sukha- jīven nāsti mṛtyor agocaraḥ bhasmibhūtasya santasya punaragamana- kutaḥ // 43
While life is yours, live joyously;
None can escape Death's searching eye:
When once this frame of ours they burn. How shall it ever again return? 44
The verse evidently relates to the denial of the concept of rebirth. Some other writers, however, have made it appear as an encouragement to unrestrained hedonism. Hemacandra, too, shifts the emphasis from the issue of rebirth to that of dharma and non-dharma.
To sum up: Hemacandra's stray remarks and comments on the Carvaka do not help us much in reconstructing the Cārvāka system of philosophy which is known to us only through a few fragments. Some of these fragments, however, appear to be spurious. What is transparent is Hemacandra's all-out antipathy to the materialist system.