Practical Path

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 34

• THE NATURE OF KARMA.
being descending to inhabit a body of flesh and thereby crippling its natural unlimited perfection, in a number of ways, is too absurd to be entertained for a moment. It follows from this that the soul did not exist in a condition of perfection prior to its present incarnation, and that the existence of some force capable of dragging jivas into different wombs is a condition precedent to their birth in the several grades of life. But how shall we conceive force operating on soul and dragging it into an organism, if not as the action of some kind of matter? It is, therefore, clear that the soul must have been in union with some kind of matter prior to its birth in any given incarnation.
So far as the nature of matter which is found in union with the soul in its pre-natal state is concerned, it most obviously must be of a very sukshma (fine) quality, since the fertilized ovum, which, roughly speaking, is the starting point of the life of an organism is itself a very minute, microscopical structure. The body of this fine material, called the karma na sharira (the body of karmic matter), in the technical language of the Jaina Siddhânta, is the cause and instrument of transmigration, and, along with the one called the taijasa * sharira (body of radiant matter), is a constant
* The taijasa sharira is a body of luminous matter, and is a pecessary link between the other two bodies of the soul--the kármâna and the audarika (the body of gross matter). The necessity for a link of this kind is to be found in the fact that the matter of the kärmâna sharira is too su kshma (fine) and that of the audarika too gross to allow any direct or immediate interaction between them, and that an intermediate type of matter is required to connect them with each other.