Atma Dharma

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 23

shadow or shade whatsoever. For this reason, it is called Parabrahman (God), Paramatman (the Supreme Soul), and the like.
In addition to being the subject of knowledge and blissful by nature, the soul is also immortal, because it is a substance by itself, and because only forms and modes of substances but never the substances themselves, are liable to be destroyed. Being immortal, the soul passes on from life te life, taking births, in different bodies, according to its karmas, successively. The sizes of the numerous bodies which it organises for itself in the course of its transmigration, no doubt, vary from time to time; but the soul is endowed with the unique property of expansion and contraction which enables it now to be ensouled in the body of an ant and again in that of an elephant. It is evident that the soul fills its whole body, since otherwise it would be impossible for it to feel pleasure or pain in those of its bodily limbs and parts where it was not; and it is also evident that the body has not a constant size of its own during its growth. These two facts taken together suffice to show that the soul expands with its body as it grows during childhood. According to the ancient rishis, the soul may expand to fill the whole universe, without leaving its physical body. It is this property or power of the soul which explains the