Jain Journal 1974 04

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

Page 49

APRIL, 1974
187
matter. For, according to the Jaina doctrine, souls exists not only in organic structures, but also in apparently dead masses, in stones, in lumps of earth, in drops of water, in fire and in wind. Through union with bodies the nature of the soul is affected. In the mass of matter the light of its intelligence is completely concealed ; it loses consciousness, is immovable, and large or small, according to the dimensions of its abode. In organic structures it is always conscious ; it depends however, on the nature of the same, whether it is movable or immovable and possessed of five, four, three, two, or one organ of sense.
The bondage of souls, if they inhabit a human body, can be abolished by the suppression of the causes which lead to their confinement and by the destruction of the Karman. The suppression of the causes is accomplished by overcoming the inclination to be active and the passions, by the control of the senses, and by steadfastly holding to the right faith. In this way will be hindered the addition of new Karman, new merit or new guilt. The destruction of Karman remaining from previous existences can be brought about either spontaneously. by the exhaustion of the supply or by asceticism. In the latter case the final state is the attainment of a knowledge which penetrates the universe, to Kevala Jñana and Nirvāna or Moksa : full deliverance from all bonds. These goals may be reached even while the soul is still in its body. If however the body is destroyed then the soul wanders into the "No-World" (aloka) as the Jaina says, i.e., into the heaven of Jina "the delivered”, lying outside the world. There it continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. There fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syādvāda--the doctrine of “it may be so",-a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny the existence of one and the same thing. If this be compared with the other Indian systems, it stands nearer the Brahman than the Buddhist, with which it has the acceptance in common of only four, not five elements. Jainism touches all the Brahman religions and Buddhism in its cosmology and ideas of periods, and it agrees entirely with regard to the doctrines of Karman, of the bondage, and the deliverance of souls. Atheism, the view that the world was not created, is common to it with Buddhism and the Sankhya philosophy. Its philosophy approaches that of the latter in that both believe in the existence of innumerable independent souls. But the doctrine of the activity of souls and their distribution into masses of matter is in accordance with the Vedanta, according to which the principle of the soul penetrates every thing existing. In the further development of the soul doctrine,