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FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS
99
days (i.e. seventy-two hours). A difference of opinion exists amongst Jaina as to whether one can be condemned to become lightning or not, for it does not seem to be known for certain whether or no Teukāya exists in lightning.1
Again, all sorts of wind, such as cyclones, whirlwinds, monsoons, west winds and trade-winds, are thought of as inhabited by what are called Vayukaya ekendriya jīva. It is difficult for us to understand that wind has a body and can be made to suffer pain, but all this is plain to a Kevali. The period a jīva may spend as wind varies according to his karma from one instant to three thousand years.
All vegetable life, or Vanaspatikāya, also possesses but one indriya. These jiva are divided into two classes: Pratyeka, or life such as that of a tree (e. g. an orange or mango tree), whose various branches, fruits and leaves possess life derived from it, and Sadharana, the life possessed by potatoes, onions, carrots, figs, &c. Strict Jaina will not eat any of the latter class, for example, potatoes, beet, onions, &c., because more than one jiva has taken up its lodging there; but they will take oranges and mangoes, once they are ripe, for then they are inhabited by only one life. Life as a vegetable 3 may last from one instant to ten thousand years.
Ascending the scale, we come to jiva possessing two iv (b). Besenses (or Be-indriya), that of taste as well as that of touch, indriya. and having six prāņa: taste, touch, body, the power of exhaling and inhaling, an allotted term of life, and speech. Such are animalculae, worms, things living in shells, leeches, earth-worms. No one can be condemned to be a Be-indriya for longer than twelve years.
1 In the Uttaradhyayana it is expressly stated that fire lives do exist in lightning. S. B. E., xlv, p. 217.
In one potato there are countless bodies, and in each body count
less lives exist.
Dr. Jacobi points out that plants and animals, being admitted by all to be living beings, were considered a better support of the hylozoistic theory than wind. Acaränga Sutra, S. B. E., xxii, p. 9.
H 2
