Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

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

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imagination of the Jains, is uncreated.* It subsists without a governor, and is eternal. Its component parts are six substances : Souls, Dharma, or moral merit, Adharma, or sin, space, time, and the atoms of matter. By the combination of these atoms are produced the four elements, earth, fire, water and air, and human bodies, as well as the phenomena of the world of sense, and the heavenly worlds. The Jains are as extravagant with regard to time as with regard to space. They consider that human bodies and human lives increase during the Utsarpiní and diminish during the Avasarpiní, periods of incredible length.t 'Souls are independent, real entities, the basis of which is pure intelligence, and which possess an impulse towards action.' The doctrine of the bondage of souls, as held by the Jains, is practically identical with the view held by Indian thinkers generally. But the Jains stand alone, as far as I know, in maintaining that, to borrow Hofrath Bühler's words, souls are to be found in apparently lifeless masses, in stone, in clods of earth, in drops of water, in fire and in wind.'
The third jewel is right conduct. It divides itself into two branches, according as it is incumbent on the Jain monk or the Jain layman. The Jain monk, on entering the order, takes five vows; he promises to do no injury to living beings, not to indulge in lying speech, not to take things not given, to observe chastity, and to practise renunciation of the most complete kind in respect of worldly goods. In fact, he is forbidden to call anything his own. Not only is he to abstain from these sins himself in thought, word and deed, but he is not to cause others to be guilty of them, or to connive at their being guilty of them. These rules are carried out in the life of the ascetic with a minute. ness that seems to the Western mind almost childish. For
* See the Sarva Darcana Sangraha,' p. 45.
+ For further details see Wilson's Essays on the Religion of the Hindus,' vol. i., pp. 808 and 309.
| Bühler's Vortrag, p. 8.
& See Bühler's Vortrag, p. 11; Hoernle's Uvásaga Dasáo,' note 21. and Jacobi's Introduction to his translation of the Acháránga Sútra,' p. xxiii.