Introduction to Jainsim

Author(s): Dewan Bahadur A B Lathe
Publisher: Jain Mitra Mandal

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JAINISM
two terms with which Indian Logic has ever to deal. God and man. Jainism was bold enough to occupy that end of the line which is conspicuous for bringing together the terms at the nearest points. Indeed, Adwaitism is the school which avowedly achieves this most successfully. But its success is the result of annihilation of the one term for the benefit of the other, with the effect that the annihilation of the one leads to the evaporation of the other. Adwaitism thus destroys not only man to give advantage to God but practically the Adwit Brahma is its own Mahesh. As soon as it tries to establish absolute superiority where only a relative existence is possible, it cuts the tree under its fect and falls flat with what it fells. The God is empty, with all his essence centred in a mere, lifeless word. Where Adwaitism thus fails, Jainism removes the difficulty by making the seperation between God and man actual and yet retains the advantage of a theory that exalts man to the very God-hood, by making the union potential. Yet the potentiality is not the irresistible current of uncontrolled events; this would, like Adwaitism, make men Gods only awaiting their time. It is only the conditional possibility of the soul to attain the union whichever presupposes actual independent existence but total similarity in essence and attribute-conditional upon the soul going through a voluntary trial through ages. The trial is the existence of the soul in this world or in the two worlds above and below. This leads to the cardinal theory of Jainism, the theory of Karma. It is this principle that makes it so prominently a school of activity, not a mechanical but a voluntary activity for heaven or hell, as one chooses. But the total signi"ficance of this theory cannot well be understood without its complementary notion of the Jagat Karan Vada,
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THE CREATION CONTROVERSY
Our philosophy handles the question from the logical,