Sramana 2008 07

SR No.: 525065
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Shreeprakash Pandey, Vijay Kumar
Publisher: Parshvanath Vidhyashram Varanasi
Publication Year: 2008
Total Pages: 242
Language: Hindi
Classification: Magazine, India_Sramana, & India
File Size: 10 MB

Page 108

Individual and Society in Jainism
It is clear that all such principles, put in action, guarantee such an amount of happiness and peace within the whole brotherhood of living creatures, such a paradise-like state of general bliss, that one should wish them to be universally adopted and followed, to the benefit of all that lives.
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On the other hand, it is true, they presuppose what appears to be a kind of sacrifice on behalf of the individual.
This apparent sacrifice at the cost of which that state of general well-being is being brought about, consists in a certain amount of personal happiness, or of expedients of the latter, which the individual has evidently to renounce, in the case of even the most insignificant of the Pratyakhyānas, and in every one of its positive altruistic efforts.
It is clear that the equilibrium of personal and general well being would indeed remain incomplete, and Jainism could not be said to have fulfilled its noble task in the ideal way claimed before, if the individual would feel the apparent sacrifice to be an infringement on its happiness. In reality, however, both the sides are in perfect equilibrium: for there are deliberations which not only reconcile the individual with that so-called "sacrifice," but make it realized that it is, on the contrary, being benefited by it, and that this benefit by far outweighs the apparent disadvantage.
First of all, the motivation of the very "sacrifice" is, as we saw, an egotistic one: for if the individual submits to those restriction, it does so in order to avoid the binding of un favourable Karma, and therewith the storing up of latent suffering, and if it recurs to those actions of positive altruism, it does so in order to bind favourable Karma, and to secure latent happiness.
And both kinds of actions, those of negative as well as those of positive altruism, it does with the assistance of certain of its own natural dispositions, which form part of its "conscience." I mean