Jain Journal 1972 07

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

Page 34

JULY, 1972
The last form was presumably its original form.
Or was it?
The text insists that once the danger of contact with matter is realised, and the bonds broken, and life freed of matter, the liberated souls are liberated for ever.
Could it be that to the first life or soul, there was denied that one knowledge of all-the knowledge of the danger ? And that for final liberation experience was essential ? And could it be that life in its pristine form has, by very knowledge of life that has been sullied, suffered, and rested, learnt, too, of the danger, and the means of its avoidance, from those liberated lives who have themselves suffered and achieved ; who have discovered too the means to keep clear from that which tarnished, to retain their purity : even learnt to use matter wisely?
Or is life, too, in a process of evolution, rising from the smallness of the one sense consciousness to higher and higher senses at last to god-hood ?
Both thoughts are sublime : Jainism favours the second.
Summing up
There is very strong reason to believe that Upanişads have indented for their philosophy on Jainism ; and that the major faults of the former are due to their desire to plant, unsuccessfully, their pet thesis of oneness (Advaitism)-spirit being all-on to the duality (Dvaitism)— spirit and matter-of Jainism.
The Jaina philosophy is an almost perfect one, and the flaws in it are due rather to the largeness of the subject discussed than to the philosophy itself.
It is a live philosophy ; ennobling and re-assuring.
It puts a supreme and beautiful value on life believing that when its fragments are disintegrated to a point almost of nothingness, there is danger to that small evolution losing itself for ever.