Selected Speeches of V R Gandhi

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Vallabhsuri Smarak Nidhi Godiji Jain Derasar Mumbai

Page 95

Air, fire, and even lightning, have life. Strictly speaking, the physical substance of clay, water, stone etc., is a multitude of bodies of living beings. Dry clay, dry stone, boiled water, are pure matter, and have no life. Vegetables, trees, fruits, have life. When dried or cooked there is no life in them. Worms, insects, fishes, birds, animals, human beings, are all living beings. There are living beings on stars and planets, and even beyond the starry region. "Life" is only an abstraction. It is not something concrete, superadded to the constituent elements of living beings. It is a generalization, derived from our observation of varying modes of behaviour of such living beings. The stage of actual development of one living being being different from that of another, living beings are classified in many ways in the Jaina philosophy. The simplest classification is based on the number of organs of sense they have developed.
Besides this category of living beings, where is one of inanimate substances. These are matter, two kinds of ether (one, the fulcrum of motion, the other, the fulcrum of rest), and space. We must bear in mind that ether and space are not matter in the Jaina view. Matter has various qualities and relationships which the former do not possess. Time is also called a substance in a figurative sense, a generalization of the moving activities of things and beings.
Every living being, from the minutest to the highest embodied one, is the centre of innumerable potential and actual energies, which are called
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