Jainism Eternal and Universal Path for Enlightenment

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari
Publisher: Research Institute of Scientific Secrets from Indian Oriental Scriptures Ahmedabad

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Jainism : The Eternal and Universal path for Enlightenment
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Jainism and Biology
Living organisms are a miracle of nature
Processes of Birth and death reincarnation
Jain scriptures have given considerable thought to physics, mathematics, cosmology, geography and chemistry, as we have briefly seen in the previous chapters but it is botany, biology and anatomy which is central to their philosophy, mainly because the prime focus of Jainism is the living beings and their salvation. The approaches of Jainism and modern biology are quite different and except for some basic concepts, not much over lap is found between the two. The approach of Jain concepts is to develop procedures for development of consciousness. Therefore they treat physical and psychic aspects together. For this purpose their approach is based on ten physical forces and five psychic forces. However, it may be emphasised that the Jains have excelled in several concepts related to the living, much ahead of the modern biology. For example since at least 2600 years ago and possibly even before (going back to the times of Rishabh), the Jains believe that plants have life and can communicate, a fact discovered by modern science only a few decades ago.
Rigorous definition of life has been elusive. Modern science as well as various philosophies have not found a complete and correct definition of life. Jainism defines life as having six physical attributes: reproduction, growth, metabolism, movement, response to external stimulation and adaptation to environment (which may imply evolution) and some psychic attributes: consciousness, learning, self awareness, discrimination between good and bad etc. However a few (but not all) of the physical attributes can also be found in non-living (organic or inorganic) compounds under suitable conditions. Detailed discussion of the various Jain concepts related to biology and botany is beyond the scope of this book and we confine here only to those aspects which can be integrated