Doctrines of Jainism

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

Page 79

The Doctrines of the Jainas
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will wage war and vanquish the enemy is our own higher nature which is of the substance of the Holy Jinas, the Enlightened Tirthankaras. They have developed the powers of that substance; we have still to do so.
“Though a man should conquer thousands and thousands of valiant does, greater will be his victory if he conquers nobody but himself.
"Fight with your self; why fight with external foes? He who conquers himself through himself, will obtain happiness."-Uttaradhyayana Sutra.
Now the Acharanga Sutra has a very strange but encouraging teaching: "He who conquers one passion conquers many. And he who conquers many, conquers
one.”
It is a strange law which all true mystics have pointed to: one moral weakness overcome and transmuted pushes out numerous cognate vices. Equally strange but true is the second clause. When numerous weaknesses are overcome our main, fundamental, moral and sin-creating weakness not only weakens but disappears.
Each man, each woman has in the lower, violencefraught nature a foundational vice-pride, or lust, or vanity, or anger, or greed, or ambition, etc. For a whole incarnation the one besetting weakness work shavoc. In the higher nature is wisdom with its dual aspect-knowledge and intuition (Jnana and Darshana according to Jaina psycho-philosophy). It is by this Wisdom-Nature that the foibles, the frailties and the falsehoods of the carnal being are vanquished.