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Verse 82
The pure soul should be known as without taste, colour and smell, beyond perception though the senses, characterized by consciousness, without sound, cannot be apprehended through a symbol or a sense organ, and its form or shape cannot be portrayed. The empirical point of view (vyavahāra naya) indeed holds that the soul and the body are the same; however, from the transcendental point of view (niscaya naya) the soul and the body are never the same as these are made up of different substances. The soul is nonmaterial in a non-absolutistic sense only. It is not true that the soul is only non-material. From the point of view of the modes in bondage, owing to the influence of karmas, the soul is corporeal in the embodied state. From the point of view of its pure nature, the soul is incorporeal. One may argue that since the soul becomes one with the body because of the influence of karmas it must not be considered separate from the body. This is not true. Though the soul is one with the body in the embodied state, it is different from the body because of its distinctive characteristics.
The soul (jīva) and the matter (pudgala) are two different substances. The former is conscious and incorporeal and the latter is unconscious and corporeal. Every embodied self (samsārī jīva) has a soul and a body. It has a gross body, and a karmic body (kārmaņa śarīra) comprising extremely subtle particles of matter. Both these bodies vanish as the soul attains liberation.
On destruction of darkness, that is ignorance, the Self attains the power of discrimination between what needs to be accepted and rejected. Self-knowledge thus leads to the science-ofdiscrimination (bheda-vijñāna) - the soul is distinct from the matter and the matter is distinct from the soul.
Excerpted from: Jain, Vijay K. (2017), "Soul Substance (jīva dravya) - As Expounded In
Dravyasamgraha”, Prakrit International Conference, Shravanabelagola (Karnataka), India, 3-6 November, 2017.
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