Enlightened Vision of the Self

Author(s): Akalankadev, Devendra K Goyal
Publisher: Radiant Publishers New Delhi

Page 29

FOREWORD
its agency. The attribution of agency and enjoyment of the results of its deeds to the self indeed sounds like an anomaly because how can one attribute agency and enjoyment (kartrati and bhoktitra), which involves change and difference to the same self (immutable conscious reality), which is essentially identical with itself without admitting any change or difference.
The separation of the structural unity of the Self from its functional diversity is unwarranted from the viewpoint of a concrete Self which consists, according to the Jaina, of its dynamic reality, something stable in the midst of its changes, a unity in diversity, a being in becoming. In this regard, the following observation of Hari Mohan Bhattacharya is quite pertinent:
A conscious reality is never divorced from its own conscious modifications and qualities in which lies its very life. Both structure and function make up the totality of the self or the conscious real. Perceptions and ideas, feelings and conations are of the self and in the self and are never to be regarded as out of vital relation with the immanental unity of the self. The self is never transcendent retaining aloofness from its own modifications, but is always immanent in them or cognition is not a mere unaccountable arustha or state of the self, knowlege is the essence of the self. It is a parinama or self-differentiation of the self, it is the self knowing or cognizing. A parinama or modification, issuing from the parinami or the modifying, and yet not in essential relation with the parinami, is as false an abstraction as the aparinami or immutable real without any parinama or modification.31
At no stage or point of time, Prof. A. Chakravarti remarks, can one separate knowledge from soul and when separated each of them “becomes meaningless abstractions, incapable of existence in reality.” He observes:
The definition (of soul] in its affirmative form emphasises the intrinsic identity between the thing and its attributes, jira and jnana Self and Knowledge. A thing and its attributes are not different categories brought together by a third category called samarnya, a