________________
22
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TEACHINGS OF LORD MAHAVIRA
-Elizabeth Sharpe, F.R.G.S., K.H.M., etc.
Mahvira denies the Advaitism-one-ness, the spirit alone being real-of the Upanishads.
He posits duality: that the universe, as man knows, it is divided into two main categories: life-jiva, and non-life-ajiva; spirit and matter; and matter, it insists, is as eternal as spirit and as real.
Life (or soul, by itself is an intangible thing, and its presence is only determined by the manifestation of itself in a material body. The manifestations of life (or soul) are consciousness, senseactivity and respiration: each life has a fixed period in the body it takes, determined by higher life before contact with that body, or not determined.
There are many souls in the universe: each retaining its individuality which is never entirely destroyed or merged into a higher being, unless its rhythm ebbs too low, when it may be annihilated in the sense of losing its identity.
There are two classes of these embodied souls: the immobile (sthâvara) and the mobile (trasa).
The first class is again divided into five sections according to the material from which it is formed: earth, water, fire, air or vegetation.
The last is counted the highest of this class: but all of them have only one sense, that of touch.
Still lower than these are the group souls (nigoda): an infinite number of beings with a common body and a common respiration. They are in a continual process of evolution, and form the nucleus for the replacement of those souls who, having attained Nirvana, have passed out of the cycle of life and death.
