Doctrines of Jainism

Author(s): Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi
Publisher: Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi Godiji Jain Derasar Mumbai

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The Doctrines of the Jainas
(1) On the dissolution of the five elements (earth, water, fire, wind and air), living beings cease to exist. On the dissolution of the body the individual ceases to be. Everybody has an individual soul. The soul exists as long as the body exists.
(2) When a man acts or causes another to act, it is not his soul which acts or causes to act.
(3) The five elements and the soul which is a sixth substance are imperishable.
(4) Pleasure, pain, and final beatitude are not caused by the souls themselves but individual souls experience them.
(5) The world has been created or is governed by gods. It is produced from chaos.2
(6) The world is boundless and eternal. It may be noted here that all these views which are reduced to four main types correspond to those associated in the Buddhist Nikayas with four leading thinkers of the time, e.g., atheism like that of Ajita, eternalism like that of Katyayana, absolutism like that of Kasyapa and fatalism like that of Gosala. Makkhali Gosala was the propounder of the theory of evolution of individual things by natural transformation. Ajita was to point out that the particular object of experience must be somehow viewed as an indivisible whole.3 The Sutrakrtanga (1.1.13) states that his was really a theory of the passivity of soul. The logical postulate of Kavandin Katyayana's philosophy was no other than the Permenedian doctrine of being.
1. 2. 3.
Sutrakrtanga, 1.1.3.5.8. Sutrakrtanga, 1.1, 1.13. Sutrakrtanga, II, 1.15-17.