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fundamental Jaipa tenets and form the basis of Jaina ethics Although common sense does not doubt the everyday experience of the reality of free will and of human action affecting the environment, a number of schools and sects in the days of Mahavira and later questioned the truth of such assumptions and advocated naturalistic, deterministic and illusionistic views The Jainas vigorously contested these Naturalism or Srabhāvavada bad many varieties but they all agreed in thinking of nature as a nonrational and non-moral system where human life remained heteronomously determined 18 Materialists went further and held that human consciousness was itself epiphenomenal and human action determined by bodily and sensuous impulses seeking pleasure and avoiding pain 19 Fatalists among whom the Ājivakas were the foremost, were determinists without being naturalists or materialists They regarded the force of Karman as a coiled up potential energy which unwound itself in time and determined the course of life 20 There were many others who denied the very reality of action by arguing its impossibility in view of the nature of the soul The Sankhya, thus, held that the soul is inactive by its very nature The followers of Prakrudha Kätyāyana went further and denied real interaction between the seven elements 21 The position of Advaita Vedānta in later days is in this respect almost similar to Sānkhya
As some of the naturalists rejected the causal law and were fortuitists, their doctrine was rightly condemned as self-stultifying 22 In fact, the whole gamut of views forming the intellectual horizon of the age may be said to have arisen from the attempt to evaluate the principles of causal and moral law as providing a rational basis for the understanding of human life and experience Ancient naturalism did not perceive any rational or intelligible basis for the understanding of natural and human phenomena, it only perceived the stark fact of different things behaving differently, each by an ultimate law of its own nature which defied any further attempt to understand it more generally The materialists were thorough-going empiricists and sought to reduce spiritual reality and rational knowledge to the content and objects
