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APRIL, 1990
Latest science has begun to perceive the existence of millions of atoms in a pin-head, revolving in a terribly continuous fashion. This is a great help to understand Jainism. Jainism posits the existence of an infinity of matter, i.e., of infinite atoms and molecules. If a pin-head has millions of atoms, how many atoms must a hut or a palace or a street or a city have? How many atoms must there be in a whole country or continent, in an ocean? How many in our Earth, in the Moon, in the Sun? In our solar system? In all the solar systems in the starry sky? How many in the whole Universe ? Certainly, infinite.
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Again, it is clear that a pin-head has no life, when by life we mean a manifestation of soul or consciousness or attention by means of the 5 senses, respiration, etc. The presence of millions of atoms in a pinhead or in a speck of dirt on the paper or the pen or on the chair does not prove that the pin or paper or pen or chair are alive or have a soul. The multitudinous movements of matter and its uncountable variations and transfigurations do not demolish the eternal wall of distinction between soul and non-soul, between the Living and the non-Living. The Living now, as ever, has consciousness and attention. It alone has this. None else can be or is conscious (cetana) or capable of attention (upayoga). The non-living never possessed this soulness; never can and never shall possess consciousness. It shall never have the capacity of attending to anything; it shall never have knowledge of anything. It cannot know. Jñana is not its forte and never can be.
This is the one primary distinction between Living and non-Living, the ignorance of which is the fertile mother of many pitfalls in Philosophy and Metaphysics. The great teachers of Jainism insist upon this distinction in very lucid, persistent and unmistakable language. They emphasise with ceaseless repetition that the Pupil, the Disciple, the earnest Seeker after Truth must have a firm, un-faltering, un-loseable grasp of this basic fact of the Universe, that the Living and the nonLiving substances quite exhaust the Universe, and make up a perfect division of it by dichotomy, and that the Living is the Living and never anything else, and the Non-Living is itself and never Living.
This lesson was taught in the great, soul-purifying gāthās of Samayasăra by Sri Kunda Kunda Acarya in the first century B.C.
Samayasara is full of the one idea of one concentrated divine unity. It is as persistent and emphatic about the Soul's Identity with Itself being the only living Conscious Reality as pure Mahomedanism is about the Vahdaniyata of God or Monistic Vedantism about Para-Brahma.
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