Gems of Jainism

Author(s): Hemant Shah
Publisher: Academy of Philosophy

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Gems of Jainism
differently by different people, God enjoys, more or less, the same status.
But then, Indian concept leads the meaning to a wider and deeper sense. The central force here is that of Spiritualism and Intuitionalism. God is attached, here not to the critical intelligence but to the inner consciousness. Theism and even the place of God in it, is a logical pursuit in the Western Theology - God is proved and then accepted. On the otherside, in Indian Philosophy God is to be realised, and for that one has to accept Him by Faith. Not reason but faith, not intelligence but intuition, not concept but consciousness is the way to realise God in Indian Philosophy. God in the Western Theism enjoys the status of a Master or father or a great First Cause of a moral Law Giver or a Creator. In Indian philosophy God is totality of which you are a part, God is all-inall, within and without. God is Supreme Spirit, Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent. God is both personal and absolute. To love this Supreme Spirit, to believe Him, to be devoted to Him and to enter into Him is the message and mission of Indian Theism. Since “God, in the sense of an extra cosmic personal creator, has no places in the Jain philosophyt", and since "it distinctly denies such creator as illogical and irrelevant in general scheme of the universe", it becomes more challenging and at the same time more interesting to find out the specific nature of jain Theism. Infact, Jainism “lays down that there is a subtle essence underlying all substances, conscious as well as unconscious, which becomes an eternal cause of all modifications, and is termed God”.
Jainism, in Indian Philosophy, is a theistic system. It believes in god and it has its own theories and interpretations. Before I show you the references and citations to prove God in Jainism and the concept and nature of Jaina God, let me also tell you about some of the root causes that led the scholars and thinkers to believe Jainism as Atheism. Roots of Jain Atheism;
In our country religion is not different from philosophy and religion and philosophy do not differ from science. Jainism, as