Samayasara

Author(s): Kundkundacharya, J L Jaini
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

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devoted Love owing to this Love reinforcing a pure kind of Delusion which again is Karmic matter. Similarly Art. The Artist's unity with his all-absorbing aim in Painting, Poetry, Melody, Sculpture or Architecture is only a child of matter, which is subtle, pure, nonharming, but all the same matter, which soils the soul and stands between it and its full realisation. Similarly, religious practices, worship, postures of ascetisim, etc., all the ladders to spirituality are material and matter-born. They fall into the category of non-soul. They are obviously not the soul in its entire fulness, in its perfect purity. They are helps for the soul to achieve self-realisation. But they are not the soul. As pneumatic belts or upturned floating pitchers are helps to a swimmer in water, but are not the swimmer, the practices of religion, even the highest of them, the sincerest and most earnest pursuit of right belief, right knowledge and right conduct are all mundane matters. They have no place in the region of pure souls. They are material, mundane, cis-liberation. As long as the soul is fascinated by or dependent upon or even in association with any of them, its connection with matter, with Karma, with Samsara is not severed, and the mundane soul does not achieve the dignity and status of selfhood, of being its own pure self, of being a liberated soul, pure for ever.
Latest science has begun to perceive the existence of millions of atoms in a pin-head, revolving in a terribly continuous fashion. This is a great help to understand Jainism. Jainsim posits the existence of an infinity of matter, i.e., of infinite atoms and molecules. If a pin-head has millions of atoms, how many atoms must a hut or a palace or a street or a city have? How many atoms must there be in a whole country or continent, in an ocean? How many in our Earth, in the Moon, in the Sun ? In our solar system? In all the solar systems in the starry sky? How many in the whole Universe? Certainly, infinite.
Again, it is clear that a pin-head has no life, when by life we mean a manifestation of soul or consciousness or attention by means of the 5 senses, respiration, etc. The presence of millions of atoms in a pin-head or in a speck of dirt on the paper or the pen or on the chair does not prove that the pin or paper or pen or chair are alive or have a soul. The multitudinous movements of matter and its uncountable variations and transfigurations do not demolish the eternal