Book Title: Essence Of Jaina Scriptures
Author(s): Jagdish Prasad Jain
Publisher: Kaveri Books

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Page 344
________________ 318 THE ESSENCE OF JAINA SCRIPTURES conglomeration in transverse direction is the same as a conglomeration in vertical direction must from the very first conclude that the timesubstance contains only one pradesha. Now, after having thus stated the Principle concerning the Knowables, he examines the self by aid of a distinction between knowledge and knowable; and, in order to have the self (atma) completely distinguished, he reveals the reason for the embodied being of the external, other-referential [i.e. from the manifest physical, objective, external characteristic of bio-energies aspect] (vyavahara) soul-condition (jivatva): DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF JIVA SUBSTANCES (VERSES 145-200) II.53. The world is eternal, complete and consummate with objects having infinitesimal-space-points; what knows that world is the jiva, connected with the fourfold set of pranas (vitalities or bioenergies). (145) Of this world, complete and consummate with all the objects, whose possession of infinitesimal-particles has been examined by us, beginning with space and ending with time, the knower is the soul only, and no other, because of the inconceivable fullness of energy (shakti) which the soul, although placed in the midst thereof, possesses for discrimination between self and "other." Thus the remaining substances are knowable only; the soul substance is both knowable and knowledge. Such is the division between knowledge and knowable. And, although this soul possesses, as cause of an innately-manifested and endless knowledge-energy, and characterized by persistence in the three times, and never absent, inasmuch as it is really its (the soul's) characteristic being,-its true soul-nature (nishchaya-jivatva) [the conscious vital force or consciousness-as-such], yet in the state of samsara, inasmuch as its self is vitiated by adhesion of matter, proceeding in a beginningless stream, we must distinguish a reason for its external, other-referential (vyavahara) soul-condition (jivatva), viz. its being connected with the fourfold set of pranas. Now he states what the pranas are: II.54. The prana of the senses, the prana of force (bala), the prana of duration of life, the prana of respiration,85 -these are the pranas of the jivas. (146/1)

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