Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 342

A Side-view of Syadvāda 325
knowledge we have to rise above the ordinary human ways. But can we do so? Jainism claims emphatically, as other systems do, that we can. But that is an ideal which can be realised only when we have been completely rid of the influences, both physical and mental, which colour and cloud our soul. For the soul, according to the Jaina position, is by its essential nature the seat of perfect knowledge. The influences which bind it to narrow and imperfect views of things are foreign to it. In its pure nature, the soul of every living being is a divinity in itself. But this divinity is still inchoate in us because of the influences. It has to be made real by our personal efforts. The perfect knowledge which Jainism places before us as the ideal can arise only when the soul comes to itself by the purging out of the foreign influence. This is the condition called by them "Samyaktva" a condition that has already been attained by their Kevalins-the Tirthankars and the Ganadharas, and it is a condition that lies open to all of us to attain. Jainism thus offers a hopeful ideal to man without any distinctions of race, caste or creed. The catholic nature of its philosophic religion is plain here. The ideal, again, is pre-eminently an intelelctual one, characterised, as it is by them, by perfect knowledge alone. The soul, when it attains its native condition of mokșa does not go on existing eternally as an unconscious substance, as the Nyaya-Vaiseṣika or the Mimämsaka would have it, nor as pure consciousness as the Samkhya or the monistic Vedantin would say, but as enjoying the infinite bliss of perfect knowledge of the entire universe and every part and event of it"STATE" In this respect, therefore, the position of Jainism is also characteristically different from that of the other systems of our land.
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The one consequence of this position is that their metaphysical system is claimed to have originated, not in the ordinary ways of human thought and knowledge, but from one who attained the perfect condition of a Kevalin-characterised by infallible and absolute knowledge of things. No wonder, therefore, that the orthodox of their faith should be so intolerant of other positions claiming to be perfectly
true!