Religion and Culture of the Jains

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

Page 63

THE DOCTRINE
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in adequate effort and begins to struggle against the current, he can succeed in loosening the bonds, even in converting the bad karmans into good ones, and in ultimately freeing himself completely from their thraldom.
As the late Justice J. L. Jaini observed: "It is not fate, nor even predestination; but it is the ever-continuous balancing of the different accounts that we keep with the forces of life. There can be no mistake, no suppression, and no evasion. The credit and debit sides go on automatically, and whatever is due to us is paid us ungrudgingly without demand. The continuity cannot be broken by change of house: the debts of London are not extinguished by going to Berlin: nor is the liquidation suspended till the Day of Judgment.
"The karmans are not extinguished simply because we give up the body called A. When we are dead as A, the karmans must still bear full fruits. The karmans constitute the karmic body: it drags us into another state of being. One may call this doctrine of Jainism almost spiritual mathematics."
"Every effect in the world, every phenomenon, every feeling, every hope, every disappointment is a natural and necessary consequence of some action or inaction of the soul. Ignorance, infatuation, the passions may be the cause of it. But the cause never was set in motion by the soul without the effect being forced upon the soul's acceptance. And yet the soul's choice is as unlimited today as ever. The only mode of exercising it is to doff ignorance, indetermination, and weakness, face facts, recognize in the bondage of matter and our identification with it the sole source of its power; and then determine to suppress it, to remove this alien matter from ourselves."
"And then, by destroying the destructive and non-destructive karman perfect freedom will be acquired, the soul will shine out in the fullness of knowledge, its sight of truth will be perfect, its conviction in the eternity of things will be undisturbed and undisturbable, pain and pleasure and their attendant