Atmanandji Jainacharya Janmashatabdi Smarakgranth

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Atmanand Janma Shatabdi Smarak Trust

Page 94

Mrs. Rhys Davids D. Litt,
He wills an act and does it. He is thus experiencing a more in self, a more in that other man, than it he (or the other) remained passive. It is a more, be it noted, in the shape of a familiar act. It is an experience which he knows about, not an act of which as yet he has no kuowledge. But to such initiations he will sooner or later come, and he will come by will. He had often willed, as here, to walk. And he las willed further; he has willed to walk, to progress, on a mount of some kind, on a living mount, then on mounts of an infinitely complex mechanism, at an indefinitely higber rate of speed, nay, to walk, in emergency, by Ainging himseil into the air to float down to earth.
And he will come yet to worthier uses of will than all that. He will come to will a thing to be done without going to do it, by direct action of bis will on the will of another, even without need of words. And yet more and above all: it is the greater welfare of that other man so influenced that he will quicken by this will-at-a-greater-power. He in a greater More-will will not thereby serve merely personal ends, nor merely corporate, nor merely national ends as such. It is just the paro, the other man, in his ow1 way becoming More faring towards the Most, that he will be willing to forward, even as he in himself is forwarding his own becoming.
Childre: are we yet, but in thee as in me is the promise and the potency, the essential tendency towards the coming-to-be. We are in the Way of Becoming, and we wayfare the better in so far as we will.
Aud now a word possibly of special interest to the Jain,
I have been speaking of man's instrument that we call collectively 'mind' in a special way, a way that I have discussed elsewhere and often. That India began, with Kapila, to specialize in analysis, not so much of philosophy as of the mind, is perhaps hardly as clearly understood as it might be. Herein India anticipated Europe by about 1200 years. The idea arose, that the man was not just body and a spiritual substance, but that from the latter an immaterial organism of factors and processes, of uniformities inight be distinguished, the essential spiritual substance or self having fundamentally nothing common with either this organism or with that of the body. The new teaching 'caught on', and was at length ad nitted into the established Brahman culture as Sankhya, “computing,' equivalent to our 'analysis', and also into the younger teaching of Jains and of Sakyans (early Buddhists), the latter calling it Patisankhana, or Vibhajja and Vibhatti: 'analysis'.
A feature for us of much interest is that the influence of the new teaching apparently acted as a stimulus to physiological analysis, India thus growing
Shatabdi Granth ]
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