________________
AN EPITOME OF JAINISM
involving as it does the idea of an exisDenial of tence without beginning But this tanta
mounts to a veritable denial of an extracosmic personal God who builds the cosmos out of the chaotic matter which, according to the creationists and other deists, lay diffused homogeneously filling up the entire space, at the dissolution of the Universe with the end of the so-called previous cycle or created it out of Himself or His own energy (at a particular point of time) through a kind of dialectic process as taught in the other theistic systems of philosophy such as the Yoga, the Nyaya or the Vedanta.
The question, therefore, is, if God is
denied where are we to look for a rational If no God
solution for the various mysteries_which of Nature? underlie the flashes of lightning dazzling
our vision, or the . thundering cataracts deafning our ears? Is it that the sprouting forth of the small seed bringing into existence a big tree, the bursting of the eggshells giving birth to beautifully moving bipeds and a variety of other awe-inspiring phenomenal changes, astonishingly mysterioas in character, which not,only infuse in us
Issicitudes
272
