Karma the Mechanism

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

Page 58

SUTRAS
ATTRACTION TO KARMA
velopment - but refrained from achieving freedom from all karma to impart their know-how to others. They acquired special karma that enables them to teach from omniscience. The omniscient are not yet liberated, but their ultimate freedom is ensured once their special teaching karma is dissolved.
According to the Jains only very few achieve this status because an extraordinary stability of body and mind is necessary to retain the bodily form after reaching omniscience.21
The twenty-fourth and last tirthankara - Mahavira - was born 599 BC in Vaishali (India). He entered the path to ultimate freedom at the age of 30 and reached omniscience about 12 years later. He communicated his knowledge and experience for 30 years before he left his body at the age of 72. Mahavira's teaching vitalized the knowledge how to reach freedom from all karmic limitations and had profound influence up to the very present. During his presence as tirthankara he taught approximately half a million people and it is said that many of them reached ultimate freedom even during his lifetime.
The original knowledge of the omniscient was recorded by their immediate disciples. It penetrates all its consecutive manifestations (scriptures etc.) like a guiding light.
Doubt in the integrity of the origin and the manifestation of this knowledge blocks the dynamism and energy with which we progress on our path - as every doubt in the purpose of an action will make its success improbable. .
Now - in the last three centuries the West cultivated a general attitude of skepticism towards any kind of information. And this certainly raises the basic question how the knowledge of the omniscient
We should take this taste of omniscience as an indication how natural, comfortably and without awe we handle this ability - even if only for a short time and not completely in the waking state. Our experi
ells us that omniscience is much less alien to us and far more accessible than we ever thought possible. 21 all other beings proceed directly to the liberated state