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all liking (rati) and disliking (arati). It logically follows that he does not have either the feeling of pleasure or the feeling of pain. Since by hypothesis the omniscient person has freed himself of the limitations imposed on him, preventing him from experiencing pure bliss, it is obvious, he is also beyond 'pleasure and “pain' which have their roots in the senses and the mind.
Here an interesting question arises. If pleasure and pain are pure subjective experiences, does the external world have no role to play in the production of feelings? Though the Jaina maintains emphatically that the external world is not the causal factor, he does not swing to the other extreme of maintaining that it does not have any role whatever. He attributes the feelings to karma rather than to ajīva. According to him the feeling-producing karma is responsible for the emergence of the feelings of pleasure and pain. The sata-vedanīya-karma is responsible for the feeling of pleasure and the asata-vedanīya karma is responsible for the feeling of pain. The external world is thus the helping cause in reaping the fruit of the feeling-producing karma. It is the medium through which and which alone man suffers or enjoys. In the absence of the rise of the corresponding karma, an external object alone is not considered to be competent enough to give rise to the feeling of pleasure or
pain.5
The conditional role that the world of objects plays in the production of feeling thus becomes apparent. The object in question (whether it is the causal factor) is thus not the essential but only a helping cause. For, as Mehta points out, if it is not admitted, a thing which is pleasurable in one's case would be pleasurable to others as well. The same thing holds good in regard to painful things. Besides, different sensations may produce the same feeling and the same sensation may give rise to different feelings in different moods. 6
The upshot of the Jaina analysis is that man is not inevitably and irretrievably subjected to feelings of pleasure and pain; that he can, by exercising his will, attain a stage where he remains unaffected by either; that when such a stage is reached he has realized personality-integration.
4 Tattvārtha-Sutra, X. 1 5 M.L. Mehta, Jaina Psychology, p. 115 6 Ibid , pp. 115-116
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