Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

Author(s): Narendra Nath Bhattacharya
Publisher: Munshiram Manoharlal Publisher's Pvt Ltd New Delhi

Page 118

The Sophisticated Stage 97 The result was the growth of a mass of theology that tended to overshadow the scientific hypothesis, which it was designed to fortify.1
This according to the later Nyaya Vaiseṣikas, the world has the atoms for its material cause and God for its efficient. The atoms can act only when, prior to the beginning of creation, they are con trolled by an intelligent being. God creates the world for the sake of making the beings experience the fruits of the actions of their past lives. The creation and destruction of the world follow one another in regular order. The periodic dissolution is brought about by God's desire to reabsorb the whole creation within himself. These are the natural overgrowths rising from the momentum which the conception of God acquired when admitted into the system. But the basic weakness ofthis conception of God is that, he does not create the world out of nothing, but out of eternal atoms. In spite of his alleged omnipotence, God is in fact helplessly obliged to work with the materials already existing. Here the actual function of God is extremely circumscribed. This basic weakness in the Nyaya-Vaiśeṣika conception of God has rightly been challenged by the Mimāmsakas. According to Kumārila, the idea of a concrete creator cannot be established because such a conception cannot describe the condition prior to creation. Kumārila has raised the important question how God could come into existence if such was the condition that there was no world before the creation of the world. Creation cannot be possible without any material and it is impossible to conceive that there were materials of creation prior to creation. Who was the creator of these materials of creation or whence did these materials come into existence? For this we are to postulate another creator, and another, and so on ad infinitum, but the problem will remain all the same. The same argument may be put forward also in the case of the formulation that God created the materials out of his own body. If God is viewed as being without a body, he cannot have the desire to create, and if he is viewed as having body, assuredly this body would not have been created by himself."
The Nyaya Vaiśeşikas, in order defend the existence of God, depend on the following arguments. All composite objects of the world, formed by the combination of atoms, must have a cause because they are of the nature of effects like a pot, being made up of parts and
1Chattopadhyaya, IA, pp. 254-57. *See my HICI, pp. 66ff,