Book Title: Jaina Psychology
Author(s): Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Sohanlal Jain Dharm Pracharak Samiti Amrutsar

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Page 220
________________ CONCLUSION AND RECAPITULATION 203 smell, touch, degree, character, variety, duration, result, and life. Our inquiry is confined only to those characters that are psychologically valuable. ACTIVITY AND YOGA Activity is the essence of life. The Jaina holds that the self possesses an innate capacity of activity known as energy (vīrya). On account of the rise of power-obscuring karma this innate capacity is distorted. This distorted energy is manifested in the form of the activities of body, speech, and mind. These three types of activities are called Yoga in the Jaina system. Thus, the traditional meaning of the Jaina Yoga is directly opposed to that of the Pātañjala Yoga. Patañjali defines Yoga as the cessation of mental activities, whereas according to the Jaina, Yoga is nothing but the activities of mind, etc. The later Jaina writers have defined Yoga also in the sense of the control and arrest of activities. MENTAL ACTIVITIES Mind is the internal sense-organ. It cognises all the objects of the external senses. The Jainas hold that all our mental activities can be classified into four kinds: true, untrue, true and untrue, and neither true nor untrue. A true mental activity corresponds to its object. A mental activity that does not correspond to its object is untrue. A mental activity is said to be true and untrue if it is partly true and partly false. Our desires, purposes, inclinations, etc., are of the fourth kind. Such activities of thought are neither true nor untrue, since they have no corresponding objects. They are more or less our own creations. VOCAL ACTIVITIES Vocal activity is in the form of speech. Speech is a particular form of sound resulting from the rise of physique-making karma. The activities of speech are also of four kinds: true, untrue, true and untrue, and neither true nor untrue. These four kinds of speech are exactly like those of mental activity. PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES According to Jaina conception, there are five types of bodies: gross, transformable, projectable, electric, and karmic. According to different combinations of these five types, the Jainas recognise seven types of physical activities: activity of gross body, that of

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