Jain Journal 1972 07

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

Page 33

JAIN JOURNAL
Matter has existence, and to determine this existence time is essential.
Existence means production, decay and re-appearance; and, Jainism insists that existence holds these three on a fourth point-time.
This fourth is ever the same, unchangeable and eternal ; but the appearances associated with time are for ever changing.
And space, or infinity, which in the text, is the fourth postulate of matter, but, which the writer has allocated for reasons of her own to the fifth place, is the medium for the flow of matter and soul ; and, again interesting to note in the light of recent research, remembering, always, the age of the philosophy of Jainism, the text says, that not only is a large part of this space empty of matter proper, but on its outer fringe, it is void of life as well as matter.
Let us recapitulate the main theories : space is the field for the play of energies. These are latent in matter which, however, is normally static.
Is this energy, that is posited latent in matter as property, released by contact with life?
Life, the philosophy insists, is contaminated by its association with matter, which, it says, has flowed into it through the medium of space—accidentally in the first instance, the text would suggest, and this might well be so ; for, if life has consciousness, it must surely have realised the posited bondage to come.
One of the properties of life, the text has already told us, is radiance ; and it loses this when it builds for itself a karmic body, or form, from matter at its disposal.
Now, though the text says that karmic matter becomes fixed. through the activities and emotions of life, it adds, that, when at last, life, by an understanding of its true nature, realises that it is being shackled by matter, it adopts the mental attitude of stopping the inflow of new matter, and the karmic matter, already settled, disintegrates with time : whereupon, the true nature of life, or soul, is, again, realised : radiant, possessed of infinite greatness and glory—omniscience itself.