First Steps to Jainism Part 1

Author(s): Sancheti Asso Lal, Manakmal Bhandari
Publisher: Sancheti Trust Jodhpur

Page 30

(Step two)
The Seven
Fundamentals
(The Tatva)
The causes leading to manifestation of life in variety of forms have taxed the imagination of all thinking men, just as the universe. If all souls or the animate living-beings are in essence alike, being formless and conscious entities, why this extreme divergence from living beings with one sense (like the stationary trees and plants) to the five-sensed human beings. Again the heterogeneousness of humanity manifesting itself in differing capacities, behaviour, material adjuncts and feelings of pain and pleasure has defied logical or convincing explanation.
2. Then why is the world full of suffering? "Birth is suffering, death is suffering, separation from what is pleasing is suffering and association with what is displeasing is suffering." Thus concluded Buddha and renounced the throne. Similarly men's helplessness vis-à-vis his lot, destiny or nature sent many a prophet and leaders to the caves or mountains to find solutions to these problems.
3. Buddha preached the middle path, Moses propagated the Ten Commandments and other prophets and leaders of men suggested their own panacea for the ills of the world. Broadly speaking, some schools of thought have accepted a personal God, as not only creator of the universe, but also that of life in all its varieties and as arbiter of its destiny. At the other extreme are those who suggest that the entire process of life, death and creation in all its manifestation is nothing but modification of matter and the part of a natural process.
4. Jainism does not accept a personal God as the creator of the variety of life and dispenser of pleasure and pain. Similarly matter alone is considered as dead and inert and cannot be held