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The Pathway to Perfection
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means. By the moral and spiritual efforts involving saṁvara and nirjarā, karma accumulated in the soul is removed. When all karma is removed, the soul becomes pure and perfect, free from the wheel of saṁsāra. Being free, with its upward motion it attains liberation or mokşa. Pure and perfect souls live in eternal bliss in the Siddhasila in the ‘alokākāśa'. They are the perfect beings. There is nothing other which is as perfect. There is no other God. The freed souls are divine in nature as they are perfect and omniscient.
For the Jaina it is not necessary to surrender to any higher being nor to ask for any divine favour for the individual to reach the highest goal of perfection. There is no place for divine grace, nor is one to depend on the capricious whims of a superior deity for the sake of attaining the highest ideal. There is emphasis on individual efforts in the moral and spiritual struggle for self-realisation. One has to go through the fourteen stages of spiritual struggle before one reaches the final goal in the ayoga kevali stage. These stages are the guņasthāns.
The final stage of self-realisation is the stage of absolute perfection. All empirical adjuncts, like the bodily functions are removed. The soul enters the third stage of sukla dhyāna. This state lasts only for the period of time required to pronounce five short syllables.18 At the end of this period the soul attains perfect and disembodied liberation. It is described as the state of Parabrahma or Niranjan. It is not possible to give, as Radhakrishnan says, a positive description of the liberated soul. It is a state of freedom from action and desire, a state of utter and absolute quiescence. Zimmer shows that, in this state, the individuality, the masks, the formal personal features are distilled away like drops of rain that descend from the clear sky, tasteless and immaculate.16
13. Dhyanašataka- 82. 14. Radhakrishnan (S): Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 233. 15. Zimmer (H.); Philosophy of India. p. 260.
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