Harmless Soul

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

Page 33

Early Jainism 19 correctly and to appreciate exactly the responsibility of the offender'. She concludes that 'One cannot then take the accusations of the Buddhists literally when they accuse the nirgrantha of not according any value to the intentions which motivate the individual'.41 She also says that passages in the Sūyagadamga, such as 2.6.26 and 2.2 (quoted above), 'are not conclusive'. 42
Without entering here into the relative chronology of the Cheya Suttas and their commentaries (from which Caillat draws her evidence) and the earliest portions of the Svetāmbara Canon, I would point out that, according to the early texts, intention is significant in so far as it may lead to or away from physical himsā, but in terms of the mechanism of bondage it is action or restraint from action that counts. For, in any given case, the intention may be good but the fact of physical hiņsā is incontrovertible evidence that it is not good enough. In other words, the emphasis in the earliest texts is not on intention or lack of it as such, but on the degree of direct involvement with himsā. Actions are judged, in the first place, according to their result, not according to the intention of the actor. The latter may be significant before the act, but afterwards it is irrelevant. It is external harm or lack of harm that matters when the soteriological consequences of an action are calculated.
Caillat herself corroborates this in her comments on the Vavahāra Pīthikā, which analyses the acts of the monk into their constituent elements in order to determine to what extent he has sinned.43 As a typical example, she cites the
41 Ibid. p. 108.
42 Ibid. fn. 1, referring to La Vallée Poussin's fn. 3, p. 2 in his edition of L'Abhidharma de Vasubandhu, IV 155, Paris 1923-31, where such passages are cited to support the Abhidharmakośa's interpretation of the Jaina attitude.
43 See Caillat 1975, p. 104ff.