Jain Moral Doctrine

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal

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JAIN MORAL DOCTRINE
of those exotic elements and armed with the sword of moral conduct, to go on clearing the way for his own uplift and self realisation.
The perfectness of one's fundamental nature and its capacity to assert itself when the foreign elements limiting it in various ways become weak, are thus the metaphysical backgrounds for moral conduct. It would be seen however that besides these two ultimate facts, other requisites which may be looken upon as psychological, are necessary, in order that an act may be truly moral. A right act is not one which is mechanically done. Nobody regards the action of water, for instance, in cooling down a thing which is heated under the influence of fire, a moral act. Even the act of a man who does it instinctively or even as a matter of automatic routine, is hardly one of any moral value. It is only when the act is based on an immediate consciousness of the real state of affairs surrounding a man together with a consciousness of the ultimate aim of his life and in the next place, in a comprehensive and correct knowledge about his own self and about the nature of the circumstantial factors around him, that his act can be called morally right. Thus for the purposes of truly moral conduct, an unflinching consciousness (which may be called 'faith' because of its immediacy) about what a man is and about what he ought to be, is the first psychological pre-requisite. And secondly, it should be seen that a mere blind belief about one's actual state and about the possibility of his transcending it,-conscious though it is, would not attach moral character to his act; he should also see that his conduct is broad-based upon a true knowledge about his own self and capacities as well as about the matters with which he is connected in his empirical experiences. A faith that one is in an undesirable state and is capable of bettering it, without which a real incentive to moral conduct would be wanting, as well as a correct knowledge regarding himself and his environments, which ultimately reveals the efficacy of an act in relation to one's self-realisation, are thus the two indispensable pre-requisites for all right conduct. The Jaina thinkers express this by saying that Samyak-darśana (right faith) and Samyak-jñāna (right know. ledge) are associated with Samyak-cāritra (right conduct)-the three together called the Ratna-traya (three jewels) being the Moksamārga or the way to liberation.
The faith which is thus connected with right conduct must itself be of the right sort. It is Darśana or immediate apprehension --not the result of discursive cogitations. The Jaina philosophers describe this Samyak-darśana as relating to seven facts. Firstly, it has for its object the Jīva or the self, implying that there is an
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