Risabha Deva

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Jain Mitra Mandal

Page 17

GLIMPSES ALONG LIFE'S JOURNEY found it easy to impress him with the need for turning to religion to take care of his soul.
The king thereupon determined from that very moment to embark on the voyage of th: soul's prosperity along the path of sannyása. He gave away costly gifts to the deserving, made arrangements for the care of his kingdom, and prepared for the noble sallekhana, the end that is sought by all the truly great.
3. Lalitanga Jainism shows heavens (as also hells) to be but separate regions of the universe. The one is no more a pleasure garden kept by a supreme kinglike god, than the other is a prison-Siberia of a divine cæsar or czar. Conditions of existence are very very pleasant in the heavens; but the hells are constituted by those regions which are the reverse of heavens,
The residents of heavens possess the outer bodies of a type that is bright and resplendent, and that readily obeys the impulses of the owner's will. It can become big or small, light or heavy, at will; it can pass through space at a rate of speed that will put the motion of light to shame. All the residents of heavens are endowed with clairvoyance from birth. All this is due simply to the fact that the material of their bodies is not gross like ours; it is ethereal.
Mahābala understool full well the importance of the time that was still left to him for the shaping