Introduction to Jainsim

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

Page 60

JAINISM human activity. We can hope to give but a brief reply to these problems, in the spirit of Jainism. So we might begin by asking ourselves,
WHY DOES MAN ACT ? Who else, if not God, makes him a hero in the strife of life? Whence is the strife at all? It is one of the paradoxical but still true premises from which every system has to start that gives an answer to this question. The Karmas is in point of its origin as original as the soul itself. The two are packed together from unbegun times. And the strife springs up as soon as the soul sets about freeing itself from this company, and ends when it attains Moksha. Not that every soul is on its way to liberation ; for some of the souls do not take heed of the lessons taught by those who have accomplished liberation and hence they weave every day a web of Karmas round their own selves which gets more tangled at every step. The soul is thus the efficient cause of man's activity and his destiny. But in its own pure nature, the soul is a principle of rationality only. It becomes à cause only when combined with the material of its work, the Karmas. The final cause is the Moksha, which is attained by true insight which is acquired either by the effects of previous good acts or by the teachings of the Shastras. This insight or as it may be styled, this faith is never a sufficient cause of deliverence as is held by the followers of the Bhagawat Dharma like Tukaram. Faith is the basis on which the ladder of wisdom and character is to be placed to reach the highest place. But it is only a basis. Wisdom is supposed to be the path of beatitude by Vedantists like Shankaracharya but knowledge without action is brain without hands. Nor is the Nirvan reached by the vast, almost bewildering, mass of ritual that is performed to propitiate the stoned Gods of the temples. In its original, Jainism allows but a small part of the incumbrances that have