Jain Agam Sahitya

Author(s): K R Chandra
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

Page 63

N. M. Kansara
39
of the soul, but it equally supplies it with a conditional quality reflecting the moral level, and as such is called lesā or lessā (leśyā). They are represented by six colours : black (kanha), dark (nila), grey (käu), yellow (teu), pink (pamha) and white (sukka), each of them being determined by a number of comparisons which, however, are said not to reach up to “reality". Together with the infinite variety of actions it is also its resplendence that changes continually, just as the soul is accompanied, the beginning of its new existence, by the only lessā that it had in its hour of death. But it is in the nature of the grades and classes of the beings that their behaviour is limited, and correspondingly, their lessă moves within certain ranges, so that beings of hell, fire, wind and lower animal-world will not reach beyond the third (grey) lessā, and all the remaining one-sensed beings not beyond the fourth (yellow). Even female gods do not reach farther, whereas their male partners have all the six and those of the higher standing have only the last three. All humans and five-sensed animals are capable of all the lessās. Though the kevalin, during his stay on earth (sajogi kevali) still has the white lessā, the siddha has no longer any of it. The individual soul has as many paesas as has the space of the world. One individual soul occupies the room of 1/n (aņu or even more) of such quantities as are presumed by the part of that or the size acquired through karman. So (substantially) the soul of an elephant equals that of a louse, as is explained by the simile of the lamp whose light, as the case may be, will illuminate a large or a small hollow room. The paesas (units) stand for different densities within the same number of units i.e. in different bodies. The units of matter differ in number from zero to infinity. The lower limit is the smallest unit of matter, the atom,
The details discussed under these topics would easily lead one to think that all the characteristics of the jiva as determined and discussed by Lord Mahāvīra refer to the soul as manifested at the astral and causal levels, rather than to that of the speculative: nature of the pure Self, as determined on the basis of logic serving as a means of revealed knowledge (śruti). It pertains to the soul