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THE ESSENCE OF JAINA SCRIPTURES
the aid of sense-organs; there are no sensational stages, but the apprehension is instantaneous and simultaneous; it is endowed with the potencies of all the senses together as it were; and there is nothing that is not visualised in omniscience. (20-22). The omniscient knows and sees the whole world, the variegated and unequal objectivity of the present or otherwise, neither entering into nor entered into by the objects of knowledge, just as the eye sees the objects of sight (27, 47).
Omniscience operates on the objects, just as a sapphire thrown in milk pervades the whole of it with its lustre; omniscience is ubiquitous in its functions, and therefore the omniscient is called omnipresent; and all the objects are within His knowledge (28-31, 35). The external objectivity does not affect Him, though He sees and knows everything completely (32). It is the supernatural characteristic of omniscience that therein are visualised all present and absent modifications of all those types of substances as if in the present (37-39). Omniscience being an extra-sensory form of knowledge (atindriya-jnana) knows any substance with or without space-points, with or without form and those modifications which have not come into existence and those that had come (41). It is also called kshayika-jnana, because this knowledge is the result of the destruction of karmas and does not involve fresh karmas (42, 52). Omniscience is the only knowledge worth the name, because its apprehension is simultaneous and sudden; a single substance has infinite modes, and infinite are the classes of substances: so to know one is to know all and to know all is to know one; it is impossible to exhaust them if they were to be known one after another; thus omniscience is the only knowledge that can really grasp the objectivity (48-51).
The development of omniscience is necessarily accompanied by . happiness (59, 19); there is no trace of misery, since the destructive karmas are all exhausted (60). As the sun has light and warmth, so the Siddha, the liberated soul, has . . .knowledge and happiness (68). This happiness is independent of everything, and hence eternal; it is not physical but spiritual (65). It should be completely distinguished from the pleasures of senses after which all the worldly beings are so much enamoured; the pleasures of senses are miseries in disguise, because they are dependent on something else, amenable to destruction, terminable, a cause of bondage and dangerous [unequal] (63-64, 76). . . .
