Istopadesa The Golden Discourse

Author(s): Vijay K Jain
Publisher: Vikalp

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Istopadeśa - The Golden Discourse
attitude. ‘All gods are one,' and 'All religions are the same,' are nondiscriminating attitudes. Incapacity to examine what is good and what is bad for oneself is the ignorant attitude.
Sensory knowledge, scriptural knowledge, and clairvoyance become erroneous when these coexist in the soul with wrong belief. It is similar to the milk kept in a bitter gourd. The milk becomes unpalatable on account of the defect of the receptacle. In the same manner, even right sensory knowledge, scriptural knowledge, and clairvoyance become erroneous when conditioned by wrong belief.
The conduct deluding karmas are subdivided into passions (kaşāya), and quasi-passions (nokaṣāya) – those that have the tendency to colour or stain the purity of the soul, and those that do no not have that tendency, respectively. There are four primary passions: anger (krodha), pride (māna), deceitfulness (māyā), and greed (lobha). The quasi-passions are nine: laughter (hāsya), attraction (rati), displeasure or repulsion (arati), grief (śoka), fear (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), male sex passion (pumveda), female sex passion (strīveda), and neuter sex passion (napumsakaveda).
Belief in substances, souls and non-souls, as these actually are, is right faith. The Omniscient Lord has called right knowledge (samyagjñāna) as the effect and right faith (samyagdarśana) as the cause. Therefore, it is appropriate to venerate and acquire right knowledge after the acquisition of right faith. Having acquired right faith, detailed cognition of substances, without fallacies of doubt (samśaya), perversity (vimoha or viparyaya), and indefiniteness (vibhrama or anadhyavasāya), is right knowledge.
Doubt (samsaya) means swaying of the mind without being able to assert the true nature of a thing. After acquiring the belief that bondage of virtuous karmas leads to birth in the heavens, entertaining skepticism about its validity is an instance of doubt. The cognition of an object as something which is contrary to its true
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