Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 12

the soul to purify itself from the karmic dirt by stopping new accumulations and destroying the old."12 Thus the soul, having been penetrated with karmic matter, and saturated with it as a stained cloth is saturated with the staining material, is still saturated with matter after it leaves the body.
The problem with this doctrine is that it seems to conflated two somewhat irreconcilable traditions. If the soul is in itself absolutely immaterial, than it cannot provide an armature onto which particles of matter, regardless of how fine they are, could adhere themselves.
In both Upanishadic and Buddhist texts, when atomism is discussed as an hypothesis, the atoms are maintained as of only one type, because they do no have to serve both a soul and a body. Qualities such as spirit and personality, and so on, are seen as by-products or epiphenomena of the physical situation. The Jain form of atomism seems to represent a slightly earlier age.
Jainism and Ajivikism
Mahavira and the Ajivika leader Makkhali Gosala seem, according to the recorded lore, to have started their careers in the same order but quarrelled over issues and separated. Several important points were in dispute between them. One was the relationship between reincarnation, and individual will or effort.
The Ajivika form of the doctrine of reincarnation was deterministic. They taught that "As long as the life monad has not completed the normal course of its evolution (running through a fixed number of inevitable births) there can be no realization."13 The possibility of early escape from the cycle of reincarnations, with its invitation to special ethical efforts, seems to have been doctrinally regard as among the blind paths that lead "to no realization."
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