Harmless Soul

Author(s): W J Johnson, Dayanand Bhargav
Publisher: Motilal Banarasidas

Page 28

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Harmless Souls
for 'activity', is used by Buddhists, in the sense of 'yokes' or 'bonds', as a synonym for the four asavas, the four 'cankers' or 'corruptions' - viz. kāmāsava - the canker of sense desire, bhavāsava - of (desiring eternal) existence, diṭṭhāsava - of (wrong) views, avijjāsava - of ignorance.27 Thus yoga is that which binds for both the Buddhists and the Jains; however, for the former, it is clearly mental events which bind (kāmāsava, etc.), whereas for the latter, it is physical action which is important, for it is physical action which 'causes the influx of karmic matter (āsrava).
Alsdorf has suggested, convincingly, that the use of the term 'āsava' by both Buddhists and Jains, is not a case of one heterodox tradition borrowing from the other, but that when the Buddhists use the term it is a remainder from an ancient, 'primitive' form of a common Indian doctrine concerning the effect and expiation of action - a doctrine which the Jains preserved whereas the Buddhists 'modernized' and 'spiritualized'.28 In other words, the 'original' belief was that the instrument of bondage, of asrava, was physical activity; the Jaina monks retained this idea, whereas the Buddhists redefined yoga and āsrava in terms of mental or 'internal' events.
Etymologically, however, yoga must be the juncture of two things. Caillat defines it as 'the attraction and conjunction' of the material particles which form karma with 'the spiritual monad'.29 P.S. Jaini, referring to the fully developed doctrine of the Tattvärtha Sutra, says that karma generates a vibration (yoga) in the soul which brings
27 See Digha Nikaya 16, quoted in Buddhist Dictionary, p. 27. 28 Alsdorf 1965, p. 4f.
29 Caillat 1974, p. 30; cf. Caillat 1987, p. 511, where she defines yoga as the attraction of subtle matter to the soul through the vibration of its 'soul-points', presumably following the SS on TS 6:1: atmapradeśaparispando yogah. See below, p. 47ff., for my comments on TS 6:1.