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The Path of Arhat : A Religious Democracy
Three Steps to Freedom
This journey to freedom has three stages of Darśana, Jñana and Cáritra, i. e., Perception, knowledge and action. If all the three are right or correct, i. e., Samyak, the self is surely on the path to freedom ( Tattvartha-sūtra by Umásvati ). These three-Right perception, Right koowledge and Right action are known as three jewels ( Ratna-trayee ) in the Jaina scriptures. Without these three, there is no way to salvation. Let us therefore shortly consider the working of these three 'jewels'.
The word 'samyag' means 'Right, proper or correct'. While discussing the necessity and importance of these three jewels, the Jaina seers have exhibited a very rare insight of human psychology and its working. However, it would be beyond the scope of our thesis to make a detailed reference to this discussion because main purpose of our thesis is to have some workable knowledge of some basic principles
(1) Samyag Darśana — Two psychological stages of the evolution of knowledge are apprehension and perception. Before knowing a particular thing including a doctrine, one first gets its apprehension. After apprehension gets mental or physical sensation and then comprehends the thing in further details. Thereafter a final stage comes when that particular thing is fully perceived. Thus the stages of gathering knowledge may be categorised like this - 1. Apprehension, 2. Sensation, 3. Comprehension and 4. Perception. As Shri S. Gopalan? puts it :
“These philosophers thus maintain that the first stage in the complex process of preception is apprehension in which there is mere awareness which is the immediate result of the sense-object contact. In the second stage of sensation there is some cognition of specific characteristics of the object. In the third stage, the perception stage ( comprehension stage ) there is also the 'identification of the object, for example, as belonging to a particular class." 1. Gopalan, A. S. ; Outlines of Jainism, p. 95.
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