Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

Author(s): C H Tawney
Publisher: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation New Delhi

Page 13

every state there is nothing to expect but vanity, vexation, and misery. Omnis creatura ingemiscit. There is nothing to look for but grief and pain, broken at best with pleasures themselves fleeting, empty and unsatisfying: nothing to look for but sickness, decay, the loss of loved ones, death, and the fatal recurrence of fresh birth, through an endless succession of embodiments. Each present suffering, intolerable as it is, is the precursor to another and another, through lives without end. The very merit that wins a sojourn in a paradise, or the rank of a divinity, must sooner or later be exhausted, for the bankrupt soul to descend to a lower sphere. The pleasures of the paradise themselves are tainted with the fear of their expiry, and with the inequalities of the inmates of the paradise.'
It is from such intolerable evils that the promulgators of philosophical and religious systems in India have always undertaken to deliver their followers, and the Jain prophet was no exception to the general rule. But it is clear, from a perusal of the tales contained in the Kathakoça' and the Uvásaga Dasáo,' as well as those edited by Professor Jacobi in his 'Erzählungen in Maharashtrí,' that, though no religious Jain could possibly be satisfied with anything less than absolute salvation from the miseries of existence as his ultimate object, the blessings of wealth and sovereignty were not absolutely despised by the writers of these works, but regarded as the reward of virtue in a previous life. This is one of the concessions to human frailty found in the Jain system.
This salvation from the miseries of existence is called moksha or nirvana, 'the absolute release from all actions by the decay of the causes of bondage and existence.'* This release does not imply annihilation, for we read in the 'Sarva Darçana Sangraha' that some consider moksha to be the abiding in the highest regions, the soul being absorbed in bliss, with its knowledge unhindered, and itself
* Sarva Darçana Sangraha,' p. 58. It appears that the portion of this work dealing with the system of the Jains was translated by Professor Cowell.