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Dr. Charlotte Krause : Her Life & Literature
being subdivided into the plurality of individual Souls ( Jīvātmā) and omniscient God ( Paramātmā ), who is able to incarnate in various ( with the Naiyāyikas in 18 ), shapes. Besides these pervading substances, there exist the atoms of the four elements : Earth, Water, Fire and Air, which are separate in the beginning.
By the Sankalpa of God, who is being directed by the innate Adrsta, i.e., Karma, the atoms are brought to reaction. Thereby, three kinds of aggregates form themselves, viz., Śarīras, i.e., bodies; Indriyas, i.e., organs of sense and Visayas, i.e., objects of the senses, each of which is composed of all the four elements, but named after the prevailing one. Thus, the human and animal bodies are counted as earth-bodies, the sense of smelling as earth-sense, earth and clay as earth-objects of sense, etc., according to the well-known correlations of Sānkhya, with the difference that, there being only four elements in Naiyāyika and Vaišeșika Philosophy, the sense of hearing is connected with the eternal pervading substance 'Ether' or 'Space'.
Thus, all the individual souls, equipped with different bodies, in accordance with Karma, undergo numberless existences, amongst which there are also celestial and hellish ones. Only Mokșa can put an end to this chain of successive births and deaths. Mokşa can be attained by the knowledge of the Tattvas, which are sixteen in number with the older school of Naiyāyikas, six with the Vaišeşikas, and seven with the later school of Naiyāyika, the socalled 'Navya-Naiyāyika School', which is a combination of the two systems. Moksa is, like in Mīmāṁsā, that stone-like state, when joy and pain, knowledge, and all the other activities and qualities of the soul, are completely extinguished.
That this conception of Salvation did not meet with much popularity, shows the poetic confession of Old Gautama, who declares that he would like better to be re-born as a jackal in lovely
Bộndābana, than enter the state which the Vaišeşikas proclaim as Jain Education International International For Private & Personal Use Only
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