Introduction to Jainsim

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

Page 63

JAINISM Christian morality which asserts that the liuman soul is the creation of God, can answer 'nay' to the same charge, although its necessity is more indirect than that of Adwaitism, Jf the God is the father of all we have, if he is the ultimate authority of our moral intuitions, if his guarantee it is that makes the cthical Ought a categorical imperative, why is not the evil that makes us fall away from the path marked out for the righteous and that made Eve taste the fruit of knowledge-why is that cvil not ascribed to the same source of the universe, the source that created light as well as darkness, the heaven as well as the hell. It is a higher notion of Zorostrianism than of the Islamites or the Christians to say that there are two equally original and independent sources of good and evil. This dualism may have its disficulties; but from the moral point of view, to hold that the same bcing of infinite goodness should have as well been the parent of so much vice and misery is a poorer idea than that of thc struglc of Angra Mainyas and Spenta Mainyas, and if pantheism makes moral responsibility impossible, unitarian theology makes evil as necessary as good and thus makes moral conduct absurd. Free from the creation theory, Jainism makes its Gods ncillier thic clainants of credit for our own virtue nor the unrelenting punishers of sins that we are his instruments in committing. The holy teachers of the Jains offer advice but cien that is not in the form of commands. They sell universal truths which are their own justification. They are not to be accepicd as being sanctificd in their birth from God ; but as bcing intrinsically adapted to the highesidros of man, thcy appeal to him with natural crec. Thc Dharma of the Jains is the condition, the sine qua non of the progress of the soul but it helps on such souls as arc bent upon movement. Water enables thic fishics to more about only if they choose to do so. It is for thicm 10 sce whether they shall move or stand still. Similarly the soul may sclect to extricate itself from the whirlpools of life,