Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

Page 188

A Comparative Study 167
be enquired; he gets all his desires and all worlds who knows that self.”?! Again, “this my Ātman in my inmost heart is smaller than a grain of rice, or a barley-corn, or a mustard seed, or a millet grain... This my Ātman in my inmost heart is greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than the heavens, greater than all spheres. In him are all actions, all wishes, all smells, all tastes; he holds this All enclosed within himself; he speaks not, he troubles about nothing; this my Aiman in my inmost heart is this Brahman. With him when depart out of this life, shall I be united.'
The problem of the Vedic or early Brahmanical speculations was to define the relation between the Ātman and the external world. A painful world, full of hunger and thirst, sorrow and confusion, old age and death, when eguated with the all-perfect, all-pervading and the all-beautiful Atman would naturally give birth to absolute pessi. mism, the conception of metempsychosis, the endless cycles of births and deaths, and finally the doctrine of Karma as the power predetermining the course of the migration of the soul from one state of being to another. Even the reward of good action is impermanent which arises out of some kind of desire, and hence the doctrine of deliverance gradually came to be based upon the conquest of all desire through the right knowledge. And this is what is taught by the Buddha and Mahāvīra. One should not fail to recall in this connection that the contemporaries of the Buddha and Mahāvīra-Gosāla, Ajita, Sañjaya, Pūraņa and Pakudha-based their doctrines on the same premises, though their conclusions were different.
Karma and its fruits are meant in the Vedas to be the sacrifical acts and their results-not so much for any moral elevation, as for the achievement of objects of practical welfare. Happiness or absolute extinction of sorrow was not the goal. Knowledge to these earlier authorities meant only the knowledge of sacrifice and of the dictates of the Vedas. It was not taken in its widest and most universal sense. These were the points on which Jainism and Buddhism had a significant departure from the Vedic line. An advance in the new line had, however, begun in the Upanişads which had anticipated some of the characteristics upheld by Buddhism and Jainism. In quest of true knowledge Buddhism regarded all production and destruction as being due to the assemblage of conditions and reached at last to the
Chāndogya, VIII, 7.1. 2ibid, III, 14; Winternitz, HIL, I, p. 250.