Jain Journal 1970 07

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

Page 17

On Meditations For Kevala
P. C. DAS GUPTA
Since supreme knowledge is the aim of yearning souls from unknown antiquity even before the dawn of historical era the human civilisation has ever been inspired by the ideals of eternal beauty and fundamental laws of the all-pervading. The image of the essential truth and grace gave an indefinable value to the knowledge imparted in quest in spite of material progress. Though urban ideology of culture or rural economy flounced by community life and trade across distant lands enhanced attainments in co-ordination gradually elaborating the concepts of polity individuals sometime yearned to attain in the past a standard of knowledge illuminating the living and the inanimate in a sense of fulfilment preconditioned by final purity transcendental in acceptance and revelation. When in the perspective of the Bronze Age and related cultures kings, priests, poets and philosophers essayed to determine the truth of creation and the phenomena of the world and space apart from surveying new landscapes of beauty somewhere attempts were perhaps made to acquire knowledge to the fulfilment of final quest identifying as it appears the self with its everlasting light. In such a context Jainism has its significance not only for its speculation through sublime enquiry conditioned by syādvāda, the system of probability, but also for its close analogy with some of the Post-Vedic ideals having as it is evident an unascertainable context along the way of Time. Inheriting the wealth of thoughts offered by the Tirthankaras from Risabhanatha in succession to Mahavira Jainism recognised the ultimate realisation by kevala, the 'perfect knowledge' attained among others by the principles of saptabhangi ('seven forms') and the understanding of the nature of pudgala aside the aspects jiva and ajiva, the latter including the forms and the formless. As it has been explained :
"The whole universe is traced to the everlasting uncreated, independent categories of jīva and ajiva, the conscious and the unconscious. Animate beings are composed of soul and body. The souls are distinct from matter and are eternal. Non-consciousness (ajiva) are divided into two main classes, those without form (arüpa) such as dharma (principle of motion), adharma (principle of rest), space, and time, and those with form (rupa) such as pudgala or matter. The Jainas believe in the atomic structure of the universe.”1
1 A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, p. 251.