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LXXIV
PRAVACANASĀRA,
After manifesting pure consciousness when the soul becomes free from knowledge-obscuring, conation-obscuring, obstructive and deluding karmas, it comes to be self-constituted and possessed of omniscience (I, 15-6). This omniscience is supersensuous; therein the apprehension of the objectivity takes place directly by the soul without the aid of sense-organs; there are no sensational stages, but the apprehension is sudden and simultaneous; it is endowed with the potencies of all the senses together as it were; and there is nothing that is not visualised in omniscience. (I, 20-2). The omniscient knows and sees the whole world, the variegated and unequal objectivity of. the present or otherwise, neither entering into nor entered into by the objects of knowledge, just as the eye sees the objects of sight (I, 27, 47). Omniscience operates on the objects, just as a sapphire thrown in milk pervades the whole of it with its lustre; omniscience is ubiquitous in its functions, and therefore the omniscient is called omnipresent; and all the objects are within his knowledge (I, 28-31, 35). The external objectivity does not affect him, though he sees and knows everything completely (I, 32). It is the supernatural characteristic of omniscience that therein are visualised all present and absent modifications of all those types of substances as if in the present (1, 37-39). Omniscience being an extra-sensory form of knowledge (atīndriyajñāna) knows any substance with or without space-points, with or without form and those modifications which have not come into existence and those that are destroyed (I, 41). It is also called kṣāyika-jñāna, because this knowledge is the result of the destruction of karmas and does not involve fresh karmas (1, 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 omniscie knowledge that can really grasp the objectivity (I, 48-51).
The development of omniscience is necessarily accompanied by that of perfect or absolute happiness (I, 59, 19); there is no trace of misery, since the destructive karmas are all exhausted (I, 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 (I, 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 view-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
