Book Title: Jaina Philosophers On Nature Of Liberation
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Publisher: Unknown

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Page 12
________________ Article Navigation following way: For example, a gourd, farmed on a high-quality piece of land, grown in the [right] season, ripened through maintaining work of attentive watering, caring and so forth during the time of its being a sprout, a young shoot, [having) leaves, flowers and fruit, after its first germination, cut on time, (when) dry does not sink in the water. The same (gourd), plastered with many thick layers of heavy dirt, with alien gravitation generated by the covering of layers of thick dirt, resists in that same water when thrown (into it), but when its layer of dirt gets wet and removed with water, then, immediately after the liberation, having been liberated from the ties of the layers of dirt, (the gourd) moves upwards to the surface of the water. 2 What do these four reasons for the upward motion of the liberated jīva reveal about the nature of the spatial transition of the liberated jīva? They most importantly disclose that jivas are independently moving substances and that like matter, that is, the other substance that has the capacity to move, they move in accordance with their own-nature. While the innate motion of matter is downwards, jīvas are, as the discussions under the second and the fourth reason emphasise, innately disposed to move in only one specific way, which is upwards. The fact that they cannot do so while they are in samsāra is because they are, as the discussions developed around the third reason illuminate, weighed down by karmic matter. When jivas are weighed down in such a way, they move in various ways, that is, downwards, sidewards or upwards, all of which are deviations from their innate manner of moving. Once jīvas get rid of all the karmic burden, their innate ability to move is no longer inhibited, and they soar up. The material cause of this liberated motion is, then, only the jīva, but when looking at the broader causal dynamics of the process, the previous impetus, freedom from [karmic) ties and severance of [karmic) bondage can be interpreted as the instrumental causes that assist the motion. Stopping at the top In the second section of this article, the liberated jīva's motion was described as upward Skmpotipnithat does not touch any spatial intermediate units, which indicates that after exhausting all karman the jiva moves in a completely straight line from the area in which it was liberated to the top of the cosmos. This is corroborated by TS Svet 2.28/TSDE 2.27, which

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