Religion and Culture of the Jains

Author(s): Jyoti Prasad Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 61

THE DOCTRINE
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unless the soul by its own conscious effort attains total liberation from both the forms of karman, bhāva and drāvy, subjective and objective, psychic and material.
The dravya-karman is divided into eight primary classes and one hundred and forty-eight subclasses. The primary or principal classes of karman obstruct, cover, obscure, distort, pervert, or prevent the full expression of the eight cardinal qualities and attributes of the soul.
These karmans are: the jñān-āvarana, that which covers or obstructs cognition, comprehension or knowledge; the darśanāvarana that which covers or obstructs cognition, comprehension or knowledge; the darśan-āvaraṇa that which covers or obstructs intuition, apprehension or indeterminate perception; the vedanīya, that which causes feelings of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, in the varied conditions of the embodied existence of the soul; the mohanīya, that which effects delusion, ontological and moral, theoretical and practical; the ayus, that which determines the nature (human, animal, celestial or hellish) of mortal existence and its duration, in contravention of the immortal continuity of the pure soul; the nāman, that which causes the bodiless soul to be embodied, endowing it with the various adjuncts of physical and corporeal existence; the gotra that which causes differences in genealogical, racial or social status, thus producing gradation in what is otherwise ungraded—pure souls are all like, without any differences of high of low whatsoever; and the antarāya that which obstructs and hampers the full play of the infinite energy and capacity of the soul in giving away, in obtaining or acquiring, in enjoying, and in exerting or making effort. Of these eight classes, the jñan-āvaraņa, darśan-āvaraña, mohanīya and antarāya are called the ghātis because they effect spiritual faculties and capacities, and so long as they remain the soul cannot attain godhood or become an Arhat-kevalin.