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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
of an orange, as a forin of sense-perception. This is the case with all embodied souls, who have not attained to the eradication of their impulsions. In other words, perfect indifference would mean a state of agitationless tranquillity, which is inconsistent with the agitated state that is called impulse. But perfect tranquillity is only possible when the last trace of the regard for bodily welfare is eliminated by the soul. It follows from this also that impulses are not destroyed one by one, but all together with the destruction of the personal element, the sense of attachment to the body. Suppressed and subdued impulses are very deceptive at times, and appear to be non-existent; but they have the habit of springing up, Phoenix like, from their ashes, and when they do so we are enabled to realize that they were merely dormant. The truth is that all actions of embodied living beings are performed through the intervention of the body, i e., the bodily regard. The impulses are, therefore, not separate or separable from one another, but only so inany different phases or aspects of one single tendency, the body impulse, and can, therefore, be destroyed, not one by one, but only all together, with the destruction of the body-impulse itself. This is supported by the further fact that the withdrawal of attention from the body and its being fixed on the soul, in itself suffices to suspend the functioning of all impulses at once. For this reason, so long as the Will is interested, however remotely it may be, in gratifying a single inpulse, be it even the one that is fed by the interest in the bit of a strip termed langoti, there can be no getting rid of the body-impulse, and not possible to attain to nirvana.
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