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RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE JAINAS
caught up in the cycle of births and deaths, it is encaged in a material body, and it has perverse convictions and harmfui conduct. The question naturally arises as to who deprived it of its true nature and when. The answer to this question is that material karma particles have veiled its natural qualities. And again it is they that determine its conditions and environment from time to time. The union of karmic particles with soul is beginningless. Though they are material, they affect soul in its mundane state. And the affected soul, in turn, modifies matter into karmic particles which it assimilates. Thus the chain of interaction between soul and matter goes on until it is snapped by the special will of soul.
Gandhi writes: "Karma is according to the Jaina philosophy a reality, as real as the walls around us, only the walls we see, but the karma one cannot see. There is not only one reality called karma, because karma with each person is different. Karma is that finest matter which a living being attracts to itself by reason of certain impellent forces which are in the individual; not only attracted to but also assimilated by the individual itself (this doctrine of karr.a applies not only to human but to all living beings); and it changes the individuality of the living being. It has become a kind of stored force, and just as a compressed spring of a watch will expand at some time, so the stored force of karma will manifest itself at some time or other. Hence it produces some kind of experience at some time or other."
"There was not any particular time in the past when this entity called the soul was without any karmas; because if we assume that there was, then it follows that after taking the trouble to remove the karmas through mental and moral disciplines, after going through a lot of ordeals, we might again come into combination with karmas. The fundamental basis of the philosophy is that, so far as the past is concerned, there was not any time when the soul was without any karma... There will be a time in future, when the soul is without karma; and
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