Jain Journal 1969 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 34

128
JAIN JOURNAL
research work that would be published in seventeen volumes containing about four lakh verses in Sanskrit. Out of these Khavagasedhi and Thiibandho, each approximately exceeding over twenty thousand verses, were prepared in the year 1966. The publication of these volumes was celebrated in October in that year. In recognition of the monumental nature of these works, they were carried on the elephant's back in a long procession like the great Siddha-Hema of Acarya Hemacandra Suri. It is worthy of mention that Acarya Premsurisvara Maharaj always used to go through the press copies of this great research work personally and revise them even at an advanced age of eightyfive.
Soul is the only entity which travels from birth to birth since times immemorial and it will continue its journey till the acquisition of the final goal, i.e., final emancipation. Atheists reject this principle. They argue that if soul would be a traveller, it should have to recollect the incidents which had happened before this birth, but we do not find any man who remembers incidents of his previous life. So soul is nothing but energy coming out from the comixutre of five elements, earth, water, fire, air and sky. That this is not a correct view is being increasingly established by recent researches in parapsychology. Innumerable cases have already been detected where a man distinctly remembers his previous birth and gives evidence in support of it. These should disprove the atheistic view that soul is a chance traveller and no more than that. All Indian philosophers are at one in their belief that the soul is an eternal entity.
All souls are possessed of infinite knowledge infinite perception infinite power and infinite happiness. Now a query arises, -If the soul possesses the said attributes, why one is an eminent scientist while another a dunce, one can perceive objects from a vast distance while another is a blind one, one is born with a silver spoon in his mouth and another a pauper, one is robust and handsome physically while another is weak, feeble and ugly? It is not a satisfactory answer that they are born of different parents, because twins born of the same parents at the same time can also be distinguished. Some thinkers try to answer that Almighty God creates living beings with different endowments. But this would make the Almighty God appear partial and discriminating and so this sort of answer is worse than none.
Jainism solves this problem by teaching that God is not a creator of the world. It propounds that karma is the real cause of the abovementioned oddities of the living beings. That the importance of karma