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JAINISM
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laymen going through the sixth to the fourteenth stages of development.* And there is a case recorded of a man, I understand, who went from the first to the fourteenth stage and thence to liberation, in the space of about half an hour. He had just committed a murder, was walking through a wood carrying the head he had cut off; met a meditating monk, asked the monk what the right course of action was for him now; the monk replied in three words: self-control, concentration and stopping the inflow of “Karma”; the man stood still, and meditated; ants smelled the blood, crawled to the man's body and eat into it; the man continued in his concentration; all the "karmas” were worked out, and he was liberated and a pure soul for ever, in the course of half an hour. This shows the spirit of the Jain philosophy; we have but to clean up, by removing the dirt of “karma,” which is the same as withdrawing ourselves from matter.
Rules of life for ascetics are to be found in Prof. H. Jacobi's translations of four of the Jain Sutras in English. But I would not recommend these for a first acquaintance with Jainism.
We have now reached the end of Section 4th (see page 5), the means of bringing out our natural qualities. The means is summed up into two Sanskrit words, which signify (1) to stop the influx of matter and (2) to remove the matter which is actually already in combination with the soul (samvara and nirjara). And, as already mentioned, this possibility shows that fatalism is a false belief, or is a superstition. It is a tenet in Jainism that man
* Hoernle, Uvasaga Dasa's translation, p. 45, 1. 127 (Bibliotheca Indica).
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