Jain Philosophy

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Agamoday Samiti

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on the lowest plane. If one thinks that he has a right to do this, that he has not sufficient strength to live without destroying life, our philosophy says that it is still a sin to destroy life, and it remains only to choose the lowest form, the less evil. We will in business take such a kind of business as will yield the most profit and will cause us to lose the least, in which we have the less liabilities; and the highest condition will be that in which we have no liabilities and no creditors, the state in which we may live without any creditors or in a perfectly free condition. That is the liberated condition. The idea of Karma is very complicated. I have told you something of it in my former lectures. The one chief point is that that theory is not the theory of fatalism not a theory in which the human being is tied down to some one, bound down by the force of something outside himself. In one sense only will there be fatalism, if we are free to do many things, we are also not free to do other things, and we canot be freed from the results of our acts. Some results may be manifested in great strength; others very weakly some may take a very long time and others a very short time; some are of such a nature that they take a long time to work out, while the influence of others may be removed by simply washing with water and that will be the case in the matter of acts done incidentally without any settled purpose or any fixed desire. In such a case with reference