Samayasara

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

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wall of distinction between soul and non-soul, between the living and the non-living. The Living now, as ever, has consciousness and attention. It alone has this. None else can be or is conscious (chetana) or capable of attention (Upayoga). The non-living never possessed this soulness; never can and never shall possess consciousness. It shall never have the capacity of attending to anything; it shall never have knowledge of anything. It can not Know. Jnana is not its forte
and never can be.
This is the one primary distinction between Living and non-Living, the ignorance of which is the fertile mother of many pitfalls in Philosophy and Metaphysics. The great teachers of Jainism insist upon this distinction in very lucid, persistent and un-mistakeable language. They emphasise with ceaseless repetition that the Pupil, the Disciple, the earnest Seeker after Truth must have a firm, un-faltering, un-loseable grasp of this basic FACT of the Universe, that the Living and the non-Living substances quite exhaust the Universe, and make up a perfect division of it by dichotomy, and that the Living is the Living and never anything else, and the Non-Living is itself and never Living.
This lesson was taught in the great, soul-purifying Gathas of Samaya-Saraji by Shri Kunda Kunda Acharya in the first century B. C.
Samayasara is full of the one idea of one concentrated divine unity. It is as persistent and emphatic about the Soul's Identity with Itself being the only living Conscious Reality as pure Mahomedanism is about the Vahdaniyata of God or Monistic Vedantism about Para-Brahma. This is the only One Idea which counts. All Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Reality, Morality, Freedom is in this. The Self and It alone is true, good, lovely, real, moral. The non-Self is error, myth, mithyatva, ugly, deluding, detractor from and obscurer of reality, immoral, worthy of shunning and renunciation, as bondage and as anti-Liberation. This Almighty, all-Comprehensive, claim of SELF-ABSORPTION must be perfectly and completely grasped for any measure of success in understanding Shri Kunda Kunda Acharya's works, indeed for the true understanding of Jainism. Few are the works, if any, extant of Jainism as digested of old by the Apostles and Omniscients after Lord Mahavira; and with the doubtful excep