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SAMAYASARA.
173
Commentary. Aparádha means without rádha or self-devotion. In common parlance Aparádha means fault or offence. From the real point of view, Shri Kundakundácharya reduces the word to its ultimate root-meaning, making fault or offence equivalent to being devoid of devotion to the self. Real truth whether it is belief, knowledge or conduct is one, self-absorption. All else is error of one kind or the other. Our lives on earth or in heaven may be the purest and the highest. But that is of no avail. Any lapse from this condition of pure self-realisation is necessarily a fault, an Aparadha which becomes the cause of the inflow and bondage of Karmic matter. From this pure point of view, good and bad are equally undesirable, equally mundane and worthy of renunciation. The soul's safety lies in itself. Safety here does not lie in numbers. It lies in loneliness. The meditation of oneness of loneliness (Ekatva Anupreksha), has this teaching for its highest meaning. The soul must realise its full independence by realising that it accomplishes its aim only when, and in so far as, it is absorbed in itself. Then alone, matter is important and the non-self stands aloof, incapable of attacking the soul or attaching itself to it. Any intermission of this self-devotion is the immediate passport to the mundane wheel going on once again.
It may be noted that this position is very much like the Sánkhya account of Purusha and Prakriti. Prakriti, matter, has no power over the Purusha, soul. But as soon as the soul turns its eye towards her, she begins to dance at once, and by making the soul identify itself with her, draws it into the witching toils of her insinuating grace and thus makes it wander in Samsára. But the distinction is this. The Purusha in Sánkhya is never the doer. Its role is passive. It is fatal. It is born of Aviveka, indiscrimination. The Purusha never in any way draws Prakriti to it. It, for ever, remains separate from Prakriti. The union is only apparent and a child of indiscrimination. In Jainism the soul is the doer, the responsible creator of its own thought-activity, which actually draws matter to inflow into the soul and become assimilated with it by the presence and operation of the passions and of feelings of love, hatred, etc. The Liberation from Karmic matter is also a deliberate act of the soul itself. There is no automatic Liberation, like the automatic stoppage of the dancing Prakriti when the Purusha withdraws his fascinated eye from its fatal loveliness.
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