Agam 05 Ang 05 Study Of Bhagvati Vyakhya Prajnapti Sutra

Author(s): Suzuko Ohira
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

Page 156

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are currently used in the post-canonical texts.
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The bearer of the soul's transmigration is a karmana 'sarira. A taijasa 'sarira also accompanies him in order to enable his ahara at the last moment of his life, and at the moment of his entry in the new birth place. Lesya is not karma. But the canonical authors here framed a basic rule that le'sya is to be carried by a soul in the course of his transmigratory path. Lesya must be therefore endowed with a certain definite function which a karmana 'sarira and a taijasa 'sarira cannot perform. The concept of le'sya must have been caught hold of by the Jainas to represent a certain role to be played by it for a soul in the course of his transmigration. Then what is its function?
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The Bhagavati XIV.1.499 reads that a spiritually advanced monk, who has died with merit of attaining more than a certain heaven but does not merit the higher one, is to be born in the region between these two heavens where his last le's ya fits (je se tattha pariyassao tal-lesa devavasa tahim tassa uvavae pannatte). And if his le'sya transforms into a worse kind during his stay in the particular heaven, he has to be reborn bearing this worse type of karmale'sya. Two points here are important enough to be taken note of: firstly, 'tallesa devavasa' evinces the idea that the upper world regions are expressed in terms of corresponding lesyas of beings; and secondly, le'sya is here called karma-le'sya which stands for bhava-lesya in a later period.
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The Prajnapana X VII.6 attempts to explain which kinds of lesya are possessed by human beings in the cosmographic regions such as Bharata-Aira vata, Devakuru-Uttarakuru, Antaradvipas and Dhatakikhanda, etc. This alleges that the cosmographic regions as such were expressed in terms of the corresponding le'syas possessed by the inhabitants. Now what would all this signify with regard to the function of le'sya?
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As we have already noted in Chapter 1, Section IV, the Prajnapana is engaged in the task of drawing a picture of the population and mobility of beings in this and that class in the universe, by way of computing how many beings in a particular class are born and die in one moment in this and that cosmographic region, and so on and so forth. All this was in the process of being made during the late third canonical stage. And as we have just examined in the previous part, the rebirth chart of beings came to be worked out during the late third and the fourth stages. The le'sya theory of the Jainas also arose during this age.
304 The rebirth chart gives us a dynamic view of jivas' probable lines of mobility
from one gati to others in the loka in the three tenses of time. Gati nama karma determines a jiva's next form of existence, and ayus karma decides his
life quantum in his next gati. However, none of them can assign to a being the