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Jaina View : The Nature of Soul
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Dātha who had flourished in the eighth century B.C. In the Jaina tradition the position as to the nature of soul that was maintained in the beginning has not uptil this day undergone any particular fundamental modification -- this unlike what has taken place in the Buddhist and Vedicist traditions, Whatever views as to the nature of soul have been preserved in this tradi. tion ever since the beginnaing uptil this day are of an identical form. Their chief items run as follows :
1. There does exist a soul and by nature is it possessed of consciousness. It is an independendent entity and hence is beginningless and end. less, 10
2. Souls are many and infinite in number and differ body to body.
3. Of the so many capacities belonging to a soul the chif ones and those obvious to everyone are the following : capacity for cogaition, capacity for perseverence or making endeavour, capacity for faith or making resolve. These capacities constitute its nature non-different from itself.11
4. Corresponding to the type of thoughts or acts undertaken by a soul appropriate impressions are left behind there in. And along with them is there created a suble body bearing the mark of these impressions and one which accompanies this soul at the time of assuming new body,12
5. Even if a soul is of the form of an independent conscious and incorporeal entity it, on account of its association with the corpereal body accumulated by itself, becomes something corporeal so long as this body remains in existence.13
6. Corresponding to its body the size of a soul increases or diminishes. However, this increment or diminution of size does not affect its basic character as a subsrance. Thus its basic substantiality or massiveness retains the same form as always. What alone happens is that depending on the different available occasioning causes its size increases or diminishes. This is a type of doctrine of transformation and that too positing something eternal-undergoing-change. Its another type is constituted by the position that the qualities or capacities possessed by a soul undergo increment and diminution. Thus even if the basic capacities or inherent qualities retain their original form their purity or impurity increases or diminishes in correspondence with the endeavour undertaken by the soul concerned. This
10 Nityāvasthitäny arūpāni.--Tattvärthasūtra 5.3 11 Nānam ca damsanam ceva carittam ca tavo tahā /
Viriyam uvaogo ya eyam jivassa lakkhapam/Uttaradhyayanasutra, 28.11 12 See the Tattvärtha aphorisms 'Vigra hagatau karmayogaḥ' (2.26) etc. 13 See 'Ganadharavāda (Gujarati)' gātbä 1638.
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