Book Title: ISJS Jainism Study Notes E5 Vol 02
Author(s): International School for Jain Studies
Publisher: International School for Jain Studies
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गाय परम
soul uses pramāna and nayas to cognize an entity. As every substance has infinite qualities and modes and there are infinite substances, so the empirical soul cognizes them using pramāņa (for complete knowledge of the substance) and naya (for partial knowledge of the substance from a specific view point or objective). Empirical souls can cognize only concrete objects (mati and śruta with the assistance of senses and mind; avadhi and manahparyāya directly though) while pure self has just kevala-jñāna. Further mati and śruta-jñāna are the only types of acquired jñāna (the other three types of jñāna are direct by soul). Some ācāryas say śruta-jñāna can cognise non-concrete objects also, though indirectly with the aid of sermons of kevalīs / omniscient. We shall now try to see how the empirical soul and pure soul use their sentiency faculty and its manifestation to know the objects of knowledge.
Cognition by Empirical Soul The empirical soul, by its very nature, needs the assistance of external agencies, either as a medium or as an aid to acquire knowledge of the object of knowledge. The physical or celestial body, accompanying the empirical soul is used as a means or a medium to acquire and transfer knowledge. The human beings are said to have the five sense organs and the body comprising the nervous system including the brain (for processing), mind and a host of nerve centers. The kārmaņa-śarīra (like a database of programs and data in computers) accompanying the empirical soul is a storehouse of the traces (karmas) and activated by the taijasa-sarīra (which connects the kārmana-śarīra with soul and the nervous system for information exchange purposes). The empirical soul is affected by the activities (called yoga in Jain literature) of the sense organs as well as the activation of the karmas and called as psychic or bhāva-mana, which cause the lumping of mind particles (manovargaņās) in the form of a lotus shaped entity called mind. This physical or material mind, in turn, interacts with the nervous system including the brain to transmit appropriate signals to sense organs and psychic mind back and forth. Brain is the first connection of physical mind. It processes all signals from physical mind and transmits the results for processing by other sense organs and vice versa. The brain has the capability to store information processing modules in its various limbs so that it process data received from sense organs and physical mind quickly and without recourse to physical mind all the time.
The empirical soul acquires knowledge through indirect means i.e. mati and śruta-jñāna. Table 1.3 gives the steps involved in acquiring these types of knowledge in a sequential manner. Thus we see that avagraha; the first stage of mati cannot start without intuition (i.e.
STUDY NOTES version 5.0
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