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THE PRACTICAL DHARMA
sary condition to the attainment of final emancipation, for no desired results are possible without the doing of the right thing at the right moment.
The subject of enquiry, or knowledge, in so far as spiritual emancipation is concerned, resolves itself into the nature of that beatific condition and of the causes which stand in the way of its attainment. These in their turn involve the nature of existing realities, or substances, and their interaction. We thus get the following seven tattvas (essentials or objects of knowledge):
(1) Jūra (intelligent or living substance), (2) Ajiva (matter and other non-intelligent substances), (3) Asrava (the influx of karmic matter), (4) Bandha (bondage), (5) Samrara (the stopping of asrava), (6) Nirjarā (the gradual removal of karmic matter), and (7) Moksha (the attainment of perfect freedom).
The would-be aspirant for moksha has to understand the nature of these tattvas, the knowledge of which is a condition precedent to the acquisition of that well-balanced state of mind which is designated by the word belief or faith.
In this connection it is necessary to point out that philosophy is concerned with the determination of the nature of things, and that the starting point of all rational speculation is the world of concrete reality which is presented to the individual consciousness through the media of the senses. A philosopher takes, in the first instance, the world as he finds it, and, aided by the methods of analysis and research, reduces the perceptible phenomena to their simpler components, so that when he arrives at simple elements he knows them to be the eternal causes of the ceaselessly shifting panorama of form and shape which constitutes our universe. Beyond these eternal causes or realities, it is impossible to proceed, because being simple in their nature they cannot depend, for their existence, on anything else; in other words, their own individual natures alone are the causes of their existence individually. It follows from this that however far back we may go in time, no beginning of simple elements can be discovered or conceived, so that we never arrive
