________________
46
HERMANN KUHN
SUTRAS
quire a special, uncommon ability, we generally have a clear picture of the rewards we intend to reap - more social recognition, more control over our life, more income etc. The emotional power with which we pursue our ideas and desires acts like a magnet that attracts all components necessary for the fulfillment of these ideas.
Karma is the mechanism that enables this process to happen. Karma12 is nothing other than the mechanism that makes us thoroughly experience the themes of our life until we gained optimal knowledge from them and our emotional attachment to these themes falls off.
What we experience is basically a neutral growth-process that we need not interpret in a negative way. The better we understand how this process works, the less we feel victimized by it. The more we can control it and the faster we achieve the results we desire, the less we will regard this mechanism as obstructive.
After describing consciousness (jiva) and the environment it is embedded in - i.e. the non-living elements (ajiva) - the sutra therefore continues to list all mechanisms that control our actions, - i.e. how our interactive karmic field works and how we can influence and dissolve it.
12 The best key to understanding the original concept of karma provides
the word itself. 'Karma' means 'action' - and nothing other than 'action happening in the present'.
The Tattvarthasutra states that our present individual karmic field always holds the entire actualized status of all our karma. It also asserts that we can change the character and inclination of all our karma at any given moment and entirely at our own discretion. There just doesn't exist a shadowy 'mountain of karına' in which supposedly all our past actions are stored.
True, the contents of our interactive karmic field were shaped by (previous) activities - as all our life is, - but this does not mean that it contains memories of all the details of all (previous) actions. The field only holds the directions in which we actively move (our desires and motives) and the intensity and the enotional thrust with which we endow our actions to reach objectives.
Jain Education International
For Personal & Private Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
