Jaina Mysticism and Other Essays

Author(s): Kamalchand Sogani
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

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to suffering humanity.76 He is a spiritual leader of mankind. Whatever issues from him is potent enough to abrogate the miseries of tormented humanity. His presence is supremely enlightening. Fourthly, with the emergence of ātmanic experience and steadfastness in it, the conquest over the mind, the senses, and the passions becomes natural to arhat. By virtue of his self-realization, he has transcended the dualities of friends and enemies, pleasure and pain, praise and censure, life and death, and gold.” Fifthly, the Ācārānga tells us that the unwise sleep, the sages always awake. 78 Samantabhadra says that being impelled by the desire to live and enjoy, the ordinary persons work hard in the day and getting tired, they resort to sleep at night, but the mystic keeps awake day and night in the process of self-realization without being overwhelmed by indolence, inertia and loseness.79 Sixthly, the arhanta has attained supersensuous knowledge, infinite potency and unique resplendence.80 He is omniscient. He neither accepts nor abandons the external objectivityøl, but only witnesses the world just as the eyes see the objects of sight82. Along with omniscience he experiences infinite bliss. Seventhly, the spiritual experience of arhat is ineffable and transcends all the similes of the world. Thus the essence of arhat cannot be completely described in rational terms. Form this point of view the arhat is the 'wholly other'. At best, the arhat can be described by negative expressions. The Ācārānga tells us that the arhat is neither long nor small, he is neither black nor blue, etc., he is neither cold nor hot , he is neither feminine nor masculine, nor neuter; he perceives, he knows but there is no analogy.83
Considered from the perspective of spiritual realization, arhat and siddha stand at par. The difference is that the former enjoys embodied liberation and the latter disembodied one. Arhat is the perfect guru owing to the delivering of sermons for general beneficence and is also called perfect deva on account of the complete actualization of the divinity potential in himself. Thus in arhat there is the consistent identification of devatva and gurutva, of the inward experience and the
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Jaina Mysticism and other essays