Gaina sutras

Author(s): Hermann Jacobi
Publisher: Clarendon Perss

Page 55

BOOK I, LECTURE I, LESSON 2.
For
the truth (comprehension and renunciation). the sake of the splendour, honour, and glory of this life, for the sake of birth, death, and final liberation, for the removal of pain, all these causes of sin are at work, which are to be comprehended and renounced in this world. He who, in the world, comprehends and renounces these causes of sin, is called a rewardknowing sage (muni). Thus I say1. (7)
3
SECOND LESSON 2.
The (living) world is afflicted, miserable, difficult to instruct, and without discrimination. In this world full of pain, suffering by their different acts, see the benighted ones cause great pain. (1) See! there are beings individually embodied (in earth; not one all-soul). See! there are men who
B 2
1 These words (tti bemi) stand at the end of every lesson. The commentators supply them also for the beginning of each lesson.
2 After the chief tenets of Gainism with regard to soul and actions have briefly been stated in the first lesson, the six remaining lessons of the first lecture treat of the actions which injure the six classes of lives or souls. The Gainas seem to have arrived at their concept of soul, not through the search after the Self, the selfexisting unchangeable principle in the ever-changing world of phenomena, but through the perception of life. For the most general Gaina term for soul is life (gîva), which is identical with self (âyâ, âtman). There are numberless lives or souls, not only embodied in animals, men, gods, hell-beings (tasa, trasa), and plants (vanassaî, vanaspati), but also in the four elements-earth, water, fire, wind. Earth, &c., regarded as the abode of lives is called earth-body, &c. These bodies are only perceptible when an infinite number of them is united in one place. The earth-lives, &c., possess only one organ, that of feeling; they have undeveloped (avyakta) intellect and feelings (vedanâ), but no limbs, &c. The doctrines about these elementary lives are laid down in Bhadrabâhu's Niryukti of our Sutra, and are commented upon in Silanka's great commentary of it. They are very abstruse, and deal in the most minute distinctions, which baffle our comprehension.