Jaina Acara Siddhanta aur Svarupa

Author(s): Devendramuni
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

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Jaina Acara : Siddhānta aura Swarūpa (12) No merit or demerit attaches to the soul. (13) Exposition of Jainism in a low key (14) Too much exposition of it. (15) To give it a distorted meaning. (16) To treat piety as impiety. (17) To treat impiety as piety. (18) To treat the righteous as unrighteous and (19) Vice versa. (20)-(21) To treat the self as non-self and vice versa. (22) To treat the path to liberation as worldly (23) To treat the secular as spiritual (24)-(25) To treat the liberated as unliberated and vice versa.
One has to stay at the first stage till one is free from never-ending wrath, pride, deceit, greed, deluding perversion, mixed deluding, and obscuration of right attitudes.
From the standpoint of time the first stage assumes three forms :(1) Beginningless and endless. (2) Beginningless but with an end. (3) With both beginning and end.
The first are meritorious so as to qualify for liberation but are not liberated. The second are those who have untied the knot of perversion and are capable of treading the right track. The third are those who after having adopted the right attitude have fallen disgracefully due to perversity. Such people fall from a higher ladder to this lowest one.
Karanas are spiritual impulses that push the soul to fulfil its mission and realize the goal. And this is possible only if the soul can reduce the duration and intensity and also the mass of the Karmic matter associated with it. So long as the perverted mentality lasts, there cannot be any spiritual rise and the cycle of mundane existence shall rotate. The three Karaņas are :
(1) Yathāpravsttikarana- Here force of Karmas can be reduced but never ended. The aspirant does approach the knot but cannot untie it. Its duration is less than forty-eight minutes. He gets purified with the passage of time and reaches the state of 'Apūrvakarana', i.e. the aspirant experiences what he never did before. It is something unprecedented. Its duration, too, is the same. The karma that binds him is short-lived and also removes the accumulated karmas. His load of karmas becomes lighter. The next stage is Anivrttikarana, where there is still greater purification. The duration is the