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FUNDAMENTALS OF JAINISM
fear and sex and the love of possession. These are the roots of desire and the feeders of its passions, which stand in the way of its salvation. Delusion is also produced by the inflowing matter in the consciousness of living beings. All living beings firmly believe themselves to be identical with the body, and never anything other than the body. Only a very few are able to escape from this terrible delusion; and they are the lucky ones who shall, by treading the Right Path, obtain release from the bondage of the flesh and matter, one day.
The appetites are all rooted in the body, even the one that is called the love or instinct of possession. It is these appetites which have to be eradicated before salvation can be had, for through their gratification additional matter is constantly pouring into the soul, which perpetuates its bondage.
The order of the eradication of these instincts is as follows: (1) The pious householder virtually conquers the instinct
of possession at the time when he sells off his belongings and gives them away, and the remaining tinge of it, when he parts from the very last vestige of possessions,
namely, the loin-strip. (2) The sex-instinct is also eradicated by the householder
prior to his parting with his belongings. (3) The saint grapples with the instinct of hunger and cradi
cates it before the attainment of omniscience. (4) The instinct of fear is a bit more difficult to be eradicated.
The saint casily conquers the fear of death, but seems to experience a great deal of difficulty in overthrowing the fear of sickness and disease, that is to say, the love of the bodily well-being. In consequence of this be even experiences a fall from the samadhi of self-contemplation many a time. But even this little bit of fear is conquered at last by the combined power of self-knowledge and the joy of self-contemplation, aided, probably, by the reinforcement of the sallekhana*-thought that enable a saint
to face calamity with tranquillity. *See the next following article for the description of the term.
