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- The Jaina Philosophy to one and the same thing. What they teach is that in a thing there is being of itself, and non-being of other things, which means that a thing can be fully known only by knowing what it is and what is not. Sankara in fact, creates a man of straw, imputes to him imaginary doctrines, and by refuting them, he knocks him down. That is his glory.
I shall now state a few of the first principles of the Jaina philosophy. Its first teaching is that the universe is not merely a congeries of substances, heaped together and set in activity by an extra-cosmic creator, but is a system by itself, governed by laws inherent in its very constitution. Law is not to be understood in the sense of a rule of action prescribed by authority, but as a proposition which expresses the constant or regular order of certain phenomena, or the constant mode of action of thing or beings under certain definite circumstances. It is not a command, but a formula to which things or beings conform precisely, and without exception under definite relations, internal and external. Jainism, therefore, is not a theistic system in the sense of belief in the existence of a God as the Creator and Ruler of the universe; and still the highest being in the Jaina view is a person, and not impersonal, characterless, quality less being. That there entire are assimilated with the individual (Bandha), how their inflow can be stopped (Samvara), how they can be entirely worked out (Nirjara), and what the ultimate state of a perfected individual is (Moksha).
This particular branch of philosophy, therefore, includes topics like sensations, perceptions, consciousness, pains and pleasures, moralities of life, moral depravities, and building of the bodies and all factors of the individuality. No other philosophical system in India has gone into so many details of life-building as Jainism has done. Like other systems, Jainism teaches the doctrine of rebirth, the nature of which depends on the nature of
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