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Jaina Philosophy and Religion
responsibility of one's own actions can remain intact and unimpaired, the gradual progress can go on accumulating through different births; and then on account of the gradual accumulation of excellences of the spiritual practice, it can attain in some birth the lofty and elevated stage of spiritual welfare.
If instead of maintaining the soul to be a persistent unitary substance, it is regarded as a series of discrete moments coming into being one after another in close succession, without there being any principle of synthesis and unity lying behind them, then the moment which was responsible for a good or bad deed would pass away into nothingness, making the law of moral retribution impossible; and, similarly the moment which undergoes retribution would be so doing without having been the author of the deed of which it is supposed to be the retribution. This is contrary to the essence of the law of retribution (karma). In other words, if the soul is so absolutely impermanent, as to exist only for a moment and cease to exist absolutely in the next moment, the law of retribution which requires personal identity of the doer and the enjoyer, would not hold good, that is, the doer of the act will be one, while the enjoyer of the fruits thereof will be quite a different person. Again, in the doctrine of soul's absolute momentariness, the experiences of happiness and unhappiness one after another in the case of one and the same soul would become impossible. Similarly, such soul cannot be the author of punya (good deed) or papa (bad deed). For, the single instant is the length of time just sufficient for it to come into existence and there is nothing to spare for doing punya and päpa. The bondage and liberation also will have no meaning, as they cannot be predicated of one and the same soul. The upholder of the soul's absolute impermanence cannot say that one who is bound becomes liberated. Bondage and liberation are two states. And a momentary soul cạnnot have two states.
As the soul is variable constant, it persists through all its incessantly originating and perishing modes. In such a soul, the different states or transformations taking place at different times in succession are possible, and such a soul can obtain fruits of its good deeds performed at different times after any length of duration of time-even after the interval of many births. If the soul be taken as absolutely eternal
1. Once a thorn pierced through the sole of Gautama Buddha, a great saint, while he
was walking. With reference to this event he said to his monks, "O Monks! in the 91st previous birth from the present one, I had killed a man with a spear. That the
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