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Jiva and Ajiva
Dr. S. S. Barlingey, Poona University
D
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Jiva.
Jain philosophers talk of Jiva and Ajiva. Is it a division, a category distinction or an abstraction ? Do Jiva and Ajiva exclude each other? Or are they abstractions from experience, and so just the concepts and not existents ?
Before we proceed further it may be pointed out that it was the custom in ancient India to give a list of concepts but the list was not necessarily exclusive and several concepts mentioned in the list were over-lapping. The Vaišeşikas mention nine Dravyas-the Mahabhūtas, the space and time and Manas and Atman. It is difficult to assume that space and time and the Bhūtas exist independently of one another and that they are not overlapping. It is difficult to imagine Pșthivi, Āp, Tejas, Väyu or Akāśa without spatial or temporal dimension. I understand that when the Vaišeşikas gave this list they treated Pșthivi, Ap etc., as also their forms, space and time as belonging to one list of investigations. The Jains similarly could give a list of what is traditionally known as Jain padārthas (Jainas called them Dravyas) and amongst them could be Jiva and Ajiva.
If we look at experience at a macroscopic level it will be clear that the world consists of Jiva or the animate and things different from Jiva or the inanimate. This is the case of a division of the world on a certain principle, fundamentum divisonis. Such division would not suggest that the life or Jiva has no spatiotemporal aspects, nor would it suggest that it has no material aspects. It would, e. g., be possible to imagine two kinds of matter one having life and the other without life. This is what is, for example, said in the Caraka-Samhita. But on such a division, the living and the non-living things or substances will both have some common properties which are spatio-temporal. For, whether something is living or non-living, it would primarily be material and located in space and would be just real, one that can be experienced.
Sometimes, however, we may classify our experience into Life and otherwise and such a classification would easily be ambiguous; for, one could mean by it either the classification of real things or we could mean by it a classification of concepts, a case of mere abstraction. It is further possible that we might confuse between the division of things and classification of concepts and in that case we might be doing what is known as abstraction but thinking that we are dividing (or classifying) the things in the world. In this case the confusion would arise due to the fact that we would be treating concepts and things on par, the images of things and concepts succeeding each other in such a quick succesion that one is mistaken for the other.
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