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THE SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF JAINISM
Note that stage four is the attainment of “True Insight"; stage five is attainment of the household state of lower vows; stage six is the attainment of a saintly level of higher vows; stage seven is very much like the state of a spiritual teacher; stages eight to ten are those of spiritual masters; stages twelve and thirteen are stages of Tirthankara Dynamic Omniscience. The fourteenth stage is the state of omniscience at the instant prior to moksa. These stages can be approximately correlated with different personality profiles. Stage 1 is marked by primitive personality, stage 2 represents regression to primitive personality from higher stages, and stage 3 relates to confused personality. Stage 4, 5, 6 can be ascribed to solid, refined and sublime personalities respectively. In stage 7, the sublime personality also has the hall-mark of extreme alertness. All higher stages denote various levels of transcendental personalities.
7.6 SCHEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF
THE LEVELS AND TRANSITIONS
It will be useful to express these ideas quantitatively. Recall from Chapter 5, that we have the five degrees 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 for each of the Four Passions. The following question arises-- how can one assign the degrees to the other karmic agents? Remembering from Chapter 6 that violence through Perverted Views can last for 3/2 j.u.c. (Jain universal cycle) in relation to 2 j.u.c. for any of the Four Passions. Thus, we give a nominal scale of 0 to 7 to the characteristic Perverted Views. Taking this point further, we can assign a maximum score of 4 to Nonrestraint, 4 to Carelessness, 4 to Subsidiary Passions and I to Activities. Thus at stage 1, we have a total karmic density of 36 units. Working in this way for each stage, we can assign karmic densities which are presented in Table 7.4 together with some comments. However, these scores and scales are very arbitrary, and their funotion is only to give some insight into the gradual progression.
Figure 7.3 gives a schematic representation of Table 7.4 at a finer scale. Along the x-axis are the Karmic Agents, and along the y-axis is the level of spiritual purification. The karmic density should be looked at in a negative way, that is as the purity increases the karmic density decreases, i.e. the effect of the Four Passions becomes less. The karmic density has been represented by the z-axis parallel to the y-axis. By stage six, restraint has been fully accomplished and the total of the degrees of Anger, Pride, Deceit and Greed has dropped to eight. Following the lines from B to B' and C to C' we find that the values for Carelessness and Anger have become zero, although some degrees of the other three principal passions still remain.
