________________
COSMOS
129
wealth of teaching which will but slowly be revealed or reveal itself. Without explanations or (spoken or speechless) hints given by a genuine teacher or guru and increasing inner development of the aspirant these teachings can not be understood. A simple example is perhaps that of the seven continents on Jambūdvīpa, our earth. In Jain iconography these are always drawn in a parallel manner on a flat disc, and this disc is surrounded by saltwater. Though in modern geography we also recognize parallels and meridians, and seen from the poles the axes of the continents run more or less parallel, the Jain picture has little to do with the actual physical situation. The earth is in reality not flat, and the ocean is not circling around a disc of land. But a round disc may be a diagram (or the artist's imagination) for a globe, which indeed consists of continents which in their totality are surrounded by only one salt water ocean. There exist occult teachings about the seven continents which relate them to stages in the evolution of life, and humans in particular. There are also ancient teachings as well as modern scientific indications that the continents were arranged over the globe completely differently in different geological periods. But, according to immortal occultism, there have always been seven continents on earth. So, if we look at the matter from an (occult) geohistorical point of view, a fixed position of the same seven continents is incorrect. So why not depict them in a parallel way as a diagram, so that the diagram contains and can convey much more teaching than a “realistic” picture can ever do? The earth has always been a globe – as the Hindus have already written in the Sūrya Siddhānta, a very ancient scripture on astronomy - and surrounded by saltwater as well. People have always been able to sail around the continents over the only and exclusively salt ocean, and over rivers. None of these facts contradicts the Jain view, but much of it is not shown on NASA images. On photographs from space we see only one earth, and we do not see any other globes or discs – though we see ring phenomena around Saturn and other planets in our solar system. We know today that the
Jain Education International
For Personal & Private Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
