Jaina Philosophy Historical Outline

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

Page 209

188 Jain Philosophy in Historical Outline between the self and the not-self. All pleasures and pains belong to the mind-body complex, which acts or causes to act. The soul is quite different from this complex, a passive spectator, a transcendent subject whose very nature is pure consciousness, freedom, eternity and immortality. The attainment of liberation means the clear recognition of the self as a reality which is beyond time and space, mind and body, and hence essentially free, eternal and immortal.2
Likewise Jain atheism also seems to have been substantiated by Sāmkhya atheism. According to the Sāmkhya, God as an eternal and immutable self cannot be the cause of the world. God cannot guide or control Parkști. To create the world or to control Prakrti cannot be the end of God's own, because a perfect being cannot have any unfulfilled desires and unattained ends. The belief in God is inconsistent with the distinctive reality and immortality of individual selves. Perception and inference do not prove God.3 The Sāmkhya proceeds on the principle that the product is none other than the material cause in a definite stage of evolution and that the preceding stages are to be inferred from that which lies open before us. By this means a first principle is finally reached, which is of the nature of cause only. This is Parkrti, the primordial matter, from which the universe is evolved in a regular course. The primordial matter moved by the laws of motion inherent within it transforms itself into the world. Hence it is redundant to admit the existence of God. The assumption of God is thus ontologically irrelevant and logically repulsive because it is unproved.
Jainism and Yoga
The twenty five principles of the Sāņkhya are accepted by the Yoga. Patañjali systematised the conceptions of the Yoga under the framework of the metaphysics of the Sāmkhya. Excepting for the admission of God, Yoga is practically the same as the later Samkhya. Yoga is thus called “Sāmkhya with God”. The Sāmkhya affirms that the existence of an eternal God cannot be established by proof. The eternal existence of the Purușas is inconsistent with the infinity and creatorship of God. Praksti evolves into the world by coming into relationship with Purușa, but the Samkhya does not clearly and cate
1SSV, III, 23-24; SK and Kaumudi, XLIV, LXIII.
SSV, V, 71-83. 'SPS, I. 92, V, 10.