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THE JAINA DOCTRINE OF BONDAGE
egades from the struggle for life, and accepted by a peaceful, vegetarian bourgeoisie-merchants, money-dealers, and artisans. Apparently, it goes back to the deepest Indian past. The theory of the karmic colors (leśyas) is not peculiar to the Jainas, but seems to have been part of the general pre-Aryan inheritance that was preserved in Magadha (northeastern India), and there restated in the fifth century B.C. by a number of non-Brahman teachers. It is an archaic bit of naïvely materialistic psychology diametrically opposed to the main tencts of the Vedic tradition. And yet, the vivid metaphor of the tainted crystal has been carried on in the composite stream of classical Indian teaching, which developed when the ancient Brahman orthodoxy and the no less ancient non-Aryan traditions at last became synthesized. In the Sankhya system it figures conspicuously, where it is used to illustrate the relationship between the life-monad and the context of bondage in which the monad is held until discriminating knowledge finally dawns and the bonds are dissolved. From the Sankhya it passed then into Buddhist and Brahman thought.
As represented by the Jainas, the advance of the individual toward perfection and emancipation is the result of an actual physical process of cleansing taking place in the sphere of subtle matter-literally, a cleansing of the crystal-like life-monad. When the latter is freed completely of all coloring karmic contamination it literally shines with a transparent lucidity; for the crystal of the life-monad, in itself, is absolutely diaphanous. Moreover, when made clean it is immediately capable of mirroring the highest truth of man and the universe, reflecting reality as it really is. The instant the karmic darkening substance of the six colorings is removed, therefore, non-knowing too is gone. Omniscience, that is to say, is co-existent with the supreme state of the absolute clarity of the life-monad, and this, precisely, is release. No longer is the monad dimmed with beclouding passions, but open-free -unlimited by the particularizing qualities that constitute indi
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