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Introduction
of karmas and does not involve fresh karmas (I, 42, 52). Omniscience is the only knowledge worth the name, because its apprehension is simultaneous and sudden; a single substance has infinite modes, and infinite are the classes of substances: so to know one is to know all and to know all is to know one; it is impossible to exhaust them if they were to be known one after another; thus omniscience is the only knowledge that can really grasp the objectivity (I, 48-51).
The development of omniscience is necessarily accompanied by that of perfect or absolute happiness (1, 59, 19); there is no trace of misery, since the destructive karmas are all exhausted (1, 60). As the sun has light and warmth, so the Siddha, the liberated soul, has absolute knowledge and happiness (I, 68). This happiness is independent of everything, and hence eternal; it is not physical but spiritual (I, 65). It should be completely distinguished from the pleasures of senses after which all the worldly beings are so much enamoured; the pleasures of senses are miseries in disguise, because they are dependent on something else, amenable to destruction, terminable, a cause of bondage and dangerous (1, 63-4, 76).
SOME SIDE-LIGHT ON OMNISCIENCE.—This doctrine of omniscience will have to be approached and evaluated from metaphysical, psychological and religio-mystical veiw-points; and it has to be understood in the light of other corelated tenets of Jaina philosophy. The soul or spirit is essentially a knower and an eternal embodiment of knowledge as distinguished from the Nyāya school where knowledge, though belonging to the eternal (p. 75:] self, is not in itself eternal but disappears like any other act;1 in the transmigratory condition this ability is crippled by karmas; so in the pure condition the soul must be a knower par excellence; and this knowledge will have to function irrespective of temporal and spatial limitations so patent in the process of human perception. Further the objectivity is a huge complexity with manifold modifications some present and some absent. Such a complex object of knowledge cannot be justly comprehended in its entiriety by a mediatory process of knowledge. So, if this complex objectivity is to be thoroughly and immediately grasped, the soul must directly visualise it; that is possible only in omniscience, when the soul is completely free from all hindrances. Sense-organs are, after all, material adjuncts of the soul incurred by it as a consequence of karmas; so according to Jainism the knowledge received through senses, unlike in the Vaiseșika system where it is called pratyakşa and explained as the contact between the senses and the objects of knowledge, is indirect or mediate, because the objects are not known directly and straightway by the soul or self. Thus the senses are the means of empirical knowledge which is conditioned by the limitations of time and space, which is liable to environmental and perceptual errors, and which has stages in its process of knowing. Reliable knowledge worth accepting as authoritative is possible only when the self directly knows the objectivity without the mediation of senses; and that is the condition of omniscience. The possibility of omniscience can be inductively proved: Men of different degrees of intelligence and knowledge are found in this world; what is beyond the grasp of one might very easily be understood by the other;
1 Max Müller: Six Systems etc., p. 559.
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