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JAINISM: A THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY "GOD IN JAINISM"
Dr. John Murphy' opines that “something very far from what we (westerner) understand by theism and even from personal deities of the well-known polytheism, in the Jaina conception of the soul, the human soul becoming God. Thus a Jaina scholar of today writes, “The fully evolved soul is God.” The soul, “he goes on, as inhabiting the bodies of living beings in the world, is not perfect. In its perfect condition it has the infinite quaternary, of infinite perception, knowledge, power and bliss. By following the proper method, the soul gradually frees itself from all matter and becomes perfect, i.e. attains emancipation, salvation or Godhood.”
And furthermore, he said “it is however, worth observing that how near this doctrine of the soul becoming God approaches to the Brāhmanic doctrine of the Upanișads, in which the human self becomes through meditation the very self of the Universe, the Brahman=Ātman. Such, then, is the place of Deity, God, in the Jain religion.
In Upanişads and Vedāntic tradition God has been defined as Sākṣī or mere perceiver who is not affected by his own creation, and by the passage of time polytheism of Vedic religion culminated into monotheism or monistic philosophy like Advaita Vedānta.
Jainism holds neither God as a creator nor as a sustainer as well as destroyer. The concept of God in Jainism denotes the highest state of existence of Jiva or soul. When a soul gets itself free from all karmas (deeds), it attains perfect divinity. A soul is itself God but it is mundane till it is covered by the encrustations of karmas; and no sooner it becomes free from all types of karmas, it gets transformed in its real nature, infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite
7°Dr. John Murphy, “The Origins and History of Religions”, 1949,
P-448 ?J. L. Jaini, “Religions of the Empire”.P-217
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