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THE NINE CATEGORIES OF
compelled to inhabit such a lodging is twenty-two thousand years, and the shortest time less than forty-eight moments,1 but as the jiva's karma is gradually exhausted, it will be reborn into happier conditions.2 These earth lives are also divided into those which we can see and those which are invisible to the human eye. By ill-treating any earth life we deprive ourselves of our chance of happiness and perfect wisdom.
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The Jaina believe that water itself (not, as is so often supposed, the animalculae living in it) is inhabited by Ekendriya jiva called Apakāya ckendriya. Apakāya include rain, dew, fog, melted snow, melted hail, &c. The shortest span a jiva can pass in water is a moment, though more usually it will have to wait there for rebirth for at least forty-eight moments; but the longest time its karma can condemn it to this imprisonment is seven thousand years. It is this belief in the power of inflicting pain on water that makes Jaina monks so particular about only taking it when it has been boiled and strained and prevents some of them using it at all for toilet purposes !
A man's karma again may force him to become a Teukāya ckendriya, or fire life, and he may have to pass into an ordinary fire, the light of a lamp, a magnet, electricity, a metcor, flintstone sparks, a forest conflagration, or a submarine fire, but one can only be condemned to be a fire life for a period varying from one instant to three
1 Antarmuhurtta.
2 Jaina differ from some other schools of thought in believing that it is possible for the jiva inhabiting a man to be so weighed down by evil karma that it may in its very next rebirth have to pass into an Ekendriya Prithvikaya, or earth life. They also differ, of course, from the Vedantists, who believe in one all-soul, not in numberless individual souls like these.
Compare 'the heroes (of faith), humbly bent, (should retain their belief in) the illustrious road (to final liberation) and in the world (of water bodies)'. Acaranga Sutra, S. B. E., xxii, p. 5.
Some Jaina think it is forty-eight moments.
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Jaina, like many Hindus, believe that waves are caused by submarine fire in the bed of the ocean.
• Samaya.
