Introduction to Jainsim

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

Page 58

SO
JAINISM height are absolutely free from the contaminations of the worldly goods and evils. The Gods are related to the world only as its supreme teachers, inculcating lessons in the "Three Jewels." As teachers, however, they work only during a short period that intervenes between the fourth and the fifth or the last Kalyan or epoch of their worldly life. And then only, it is the infuence of the Punya of the andience who gather around the Holy Teachers during those fixed periods that inspires the Kevalins in their pre-Virran periods, says the great author of the Samayasar, to undertake the work of expounding the path of salvation. Thus though the Gods are in a way related to the world as its teachers, they are, to use an usual Jain simile, lotuses in water i. e. related and yet aloof from the element, from which they grow and still remaio free.
Says Lucretius (I1, 646) :Omnis enim per se divom nature necesse est Immortali avo sunima cum pace frvater, Semota a nostris relens subjunctaque louje. Nam privata dolore ommi, privata periclis, Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri, Nec bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur ira.“
Well may these words apply to the Gods of Jaipism. This description of the Gods is not however the nature of what are styled Devas residing in the heavens, in Jain literature. These are in the essence beings like men, only enjoying higher, longer and more intense pleasure. But they have pains going along
• Mr. Morley, in his Gladstone III-19, translates these lines thus, "For the nature of Gods must ever of itself enjoy repose supreme through endless time, far withdrawn from all concerns of ours, free from all our pain free from all our perils, strong in resources of its owa, see nought from us; no favour win it, no anger moves."