Jain Journal 1972 07

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

Page 29

JAIN JOURNAL
Still lower than these are the group souls (nigoda) : an infinite number of beings with a common body and a common respiration.
They are in a continual process of evolution, and form the nucleus for the replacement of those souls, who, having attained nirvāņa, have passed out of the cycle of life and death.
There is no suggestion that contact with the higher life gives them the impetus : and it is a strange thought that these group lives in man and beast are to replace those Highest Beings who through millions of years of strife and evolution have, at last, attained to a state of beatitude and a stability that admits no further change.
The second class, the mobile, is divided into four types : those with two senses, those with three, those with four, and those with five. Those with one sense alone are microscopic organisms residing in other bodies : some in earth, some in water, some in air, some in light and so on
Oysters and worms, the text says, have two senses those of taste and smell.
Ants and insects have three senses : those of taste, smell and touch.
Bees have four senses : those of taste, smell, touch and sight.
The five-sensed beings, birds and animals, have a fifth faculty, that of intelligence, the highest of them all, man, having discrimination as well; the power to discern between the beneficial and injurious.
Knowledge, the philosophy says, is inherent in every being with the consciousness that is in every life : for consciousness itself is the quality of life or soul. But this knowledge differs greatly in degree.
There are five kinds of knowledge :
(1) Knowledge derived through the senses in the observation of
nature (mati-jñāna),
(2) Knowledge of the scriptures (fruta-jñāna),
(3) Knowledge by experience, one's own or that of another
(avadhi-jñāna),