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JAINA VIEW OF KARMA COMPARED WITH ......
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God in the realm of nature and his occasional intervention etc. this leads to fatalism and pessimism. The doctrine of grace is indeed a disgrace to the idea of man as maker of his destiny. This loss of ethical autonomy takes away the very basis of our moral life and perhaps is generated by a false belief that the potency of karma is also destroyed with the destruction of the human body.
The Jaina theory of karma might be accused of placing the destiny of man in the hands of ruthless law and not in those of a merciful God, who might be pursued easily to improve it.
Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson makes a similar projection when she says that” the belief in karma and transmigration kills all sympathy and human kindness for suffers, since any pain a man endures is only the wages he has earned in a previous birth. “But in view of tremendous inequalities pervading the world, commented Dr. Ramjee Singh'I hope, Mrs. Stevenson, if she cares to be a little impartial, will agree that if everything is attributed to Him, then a God all-merciful (being also Omnipotent) has to be a God unjust. In fact, the science of karma is the real science of spirituality; in so far it tries to unfold the real nature of spirit or self. Unless we have a thorough knowledge of karma, we cannot know about the true nature of spirit or self, the knowledge of identity between the body and the self and so on.
The entire doctrine of karma is based on the belief that the universe is a system subject to laws inherent in its own constitution. It also involves the idea of immortality of soul and metempsychosis because if the work of fruition has not been fully worked out in one life, future life is a logical necessity. Hence the belief in the transmigration and immortality also follows. This is nothing other than science of spirituality.
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SoSinclair Stevenson, "The heart of Jainism”, 1995, P-163
Dr. Ramjee Singh, “Jain Concept of Omniscience", P-109
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