________________
200
JAINA PSYCHOLOGY
sesses organic feelings, even though he is not in possession of sensory perception. To argue that because of the physical body he possesses he has to feel is not a satisfactory explanation, inasmuch as just as in spite of the body he does not cognise with his senseorgans so also he may not feel despite the body he possesses. Furthermore, the feelings of pleasure and pain are necessarily related to the emotions of liking and disliking. The omniscient who is free from all emotion, logically speaking, cannot have any feeling of pleasure and pain. PLEASURE AND PAIN
The essential cause of pleasure as well as pain is the karma corresponding to it. The external object that is generally understood to be the sole cause of a particular type of feeling is only a helping cause. If such is not the case a thing which is pleasurable to me would also be pleasurable to others. But our experience does not tell so.
The Jaina psychologist does not agree with Schopenhauer who regards pain to be positive in character and pleasure to be negative in nature. According to the Jaina theory of karma, the feeling of pleasure as well as pain is produced on account of the rise of feeling-producing karma. The rise in both cases is positive in character. Hence, both pleasure and pain are positively real. The absolute negation of feeling is nothing but the absence of feeling. In such a state of consciousness there is no feeling at all. Regarding the controversy of neutral feelings, the Jaina, unlike the Buddhist, does not recognize any such category. All feeling is categorically divided into two types: pleasant and painful. There is no possibility of a feeling which is neither pleasurable nor painful. Similarly, pleasure and pain cannot co-exist in a mixture. The so-called mixed feelings are nothing but various successions of pleasure and pain. In these cases either pleasure is followed by pain or pain by pleasure. Both of them cannot arise simultaneously, since no two conscious activities occur at one and the same moment. It is, no doubt, a fact that pleasure can immediately follow pain and vice versa. The argument advanced by the Jaina philosophers is that because of the antagonism of the two pleasure and pain cannot arise simultaneously. In our opinion, no two conscious activities can synchronise. It is immaterial whether they are antagonistic or not.
