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Dr. Charlotte Krause : Her Life & Literature
responsibility for its moral attitude and actions. But Jainism clearly states that the individual is gifted with a certain amount of freedom of will : a fact which none of all the writers on Jainism has up till now, duly emphasized. And still, this tenet forms one of the most important and most complicate chapters of the doctrine of Karma, as expounded exhaustively in the Jaina Scriptures. They state, it is true, that the soul is indeed constantly under the control of Karma, that its body and its sufferings and joys are indeed shaped by Karma, and that even those passions that shake it, and all the fatal instincts that arise in it, are predestined by Karma; but, on the other hand, they most emphatically declare that the soul is endowed with the power of breaking, by its free resolution and activity, the most obnoxious of the fetters of this very Karma, of destroying its own evil dispositions, and of suffocating the flames of all the various kinds of passion, before they can overpower it. That means nothing else but that the first and essential step towards religious activity is, according to Jainism, a pronounced act of free volition, and that the soul is indeed, to a considerable extent, the lord of its own fate.
Thus, Jainism does not torpify its followers by the terrors of Karma, nor does it make them languish in unhealthy; effeminate fatalism as many people think all Oriental religions do : but on the contrary, it trains the individual to become a true hero on the battlefield of self-conquest.
For it does presuppose a great deal of heroism on the part of the hearer, to make him fully realize the cruel irony of this play of life, viz., how they all strive after happiness by all means of physical and mental activity, from eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, up to sport and play, traffic and trade, art and science, strive after happiness at any cost, even at the cost of the well-being of others, and to reach, alas, just the contrary, viz., the binding of undesirable Karma, and therewith latent sorrow and suffering. To make him realize all this, to make him know that he cannot even quietly sit and breathe without killing and harming life round about, killing and
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