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placed the obligation of man to follow his own spiritual nature In place of the prevailing religio-ethical outlook which morally recognized and sought to sacramentalize the needs and relationships arising out of the natural course and historical traditions of human life, the Jaina tradition sought to ground ethics on the needs and logic of man's higher spiritual nature It emphasized the curbing of passions, the training of human faculties to follow the self-imposed regulation of spiritual freedom rather than the heteronomy of natural desires and impulses, in short, the realization of spiritual perfection
It may be objected that such an outlook which preaches the renunciation of social obligations could hardly be called ethical in any recognizable sense of the term This objection, however, arises from a particular bias with respect to ethical theory What is essential to ethical endeavour is to seek such regulatory principles of conduct as the human psyche could discover autonomously If action were unreal or wholly determined by natural causes or habits created by experience, it would be vain to speak of ethics The Jainas, however, strongly held that action has reality and relative freedom and that it needs to be regulated by principles which can be discovered through spiritual intuition and through the tradition of wisdom in which such intuition has found expression The Analysis of Action
The Jaina view is said to be the affirmation of the soul, affirmation of action, affirmation of the world' Action or Kiiyā has its source in the innate spontaneity or power (virya) of the soul This purely spiritual power of the soul provides the apperceptive focus (upayoga) to the mental activity which includes diverse conative states and impulses and their resultant disposition and effects Mental activity in turn induces physical motion and the result is the inflow of material particles, in particular, of the infinite and ubiquitous subtle particles of Karman which contact the soul and cover up its parts in diverse ways.10 This is the process of Yoga and Bandha 11 From the innate freedom of the spiritual will to its getting helplessly caught in the meshes of Karman,
