Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

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184 Jain Philosophy in Historical Outline
Gunas are described as goodness, energy and delusion, or light, colour and darkness; yet these Gunas are not qualities in our sense of the word, but as Prof. Garbe adequately calls them, constituents of primitive matter. It is quite in accordance with this way of thinking that the ancient Jain texts usually speak only of substances, dravyas, and their development or modifications, paryāyas; and when they mention Gunas, qualities, besides, which, however, is done but rarely in the Sūtras, and regularly in comparatively modern books only, this seems to be a later innovation due to the influence which the philosophy and terminology of the Nyaya-Vaiśeṣika gradually gained over the scientific thoughts of the Hindus.""1
However, the similarities between the essentials of the Samkhya and those of Jainism can hardly be overlooked. The Samkhya wants to explain the world in terms of two basic categories namely, Puruşa and Prakṛti, just as Jainism wants to explain everything in terms of Jiva and Ajīva. The Samkhya concepts of Puruşa and Prakṛti are very primitive. In the earlier phases of the evolution of the Samkhya thought these concepts evidently stood for the male and female principles of creation. This is also proved by the evidence furnished by the later Samkhya treatises. In the subsequent stages of the development of the Samkhya thought Puruşa or the male principle came to denote living being and finally soul and Prakṛti or the female principle, the primordial substance, the inanimate matter. The same holds good in the case of Jain Jīva and Ajiva, living and non-living, which later came to denote soul and inanimate substances, the latter being further subdivided into Pudgala (matter), Ākāśa (space), Kāla (time), Dharma (motion) and Adharma (rest). As in the Samkhya, so in Jainism the souls are infinite in number.
The evolution of the world has its starting point, in the Samkhya, in the contact (samyoga) between Puruşa or the self and Prakrti or primal matter. This contact does not however mean any kind of ordinary conjunction, but a sort of effective relation through which Prakrti is influenced by the presence of Puruşa, more or less in the same way as the Jīva attracts Pudgala in Jainism. There can be no evolution unless the two become somehow related to each other. The Jain conception, which is under different conditions blended with the doctrine of Karma, regarding the union of soul and matter, is basically the same. A soul acquires the body that it inwardly craves
1SBE, XLV; introduction, XXIV.