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The Philosophical Teaching of Lord Mahavira
203
So matter possesses, at one and the same time, two innate properties: one of movement, the other of rest; and it is these two principles, inherent in matter, that have introduced order into the universes.
The fourth postulate is time.
Time in Mahâvîra's philosophy is a postulate necessary for the understanding of growth and existence.
It is a condition for the change in matter: matter, being as eternal as life, may, by its inner energy, change; but its total quantity never increases or decreases.
Matter has existence, and to determine this existence time is essential.
Existence means production, decay and re-appearance; and Mahâvîra insists that existence holds these three on a fourth point-time.
This fourth is ever the same, unchangeable and eternal; but the appearance associated with time are for ever changing.
And space, or infinity, which is the fourth postulate of matter, but, which the writer has allocated for reasons of her own to the fifth place, is the medium for the flow of matter and soul; and, again, interesting to note in the light of recent research that, not only is a large part of this space empty of matter proper, but, on its outer fringe, it is void of life as well as matter.
Let us re-capitulate the main theories: space is the field for the play of energies. These are latent in matter which, however, is normally static.
Is this energy, that is posited latent in matter as a property, released by contact with life?
Life, the philosophy insists, is contaminated by its association with matter, which, it says, has flowed into it through the medium of space-accidentally in the first instance, the text would suggest, and this might well be so; for, if life has consciousness, it must surely have realized the posited bondage to come.
One of the properties of life is radiance; and it loses this when it builds for itself a karmic body, or form, from matter at its disposal.
Now, though karmic matter becomes fixed through the activities and emotions of life, by an understanding of its true nature, it adopts the mental attitude of stopping the in-flow of
