Shravakachar of Vasunandini

Author(s): Signe Kirde
Publisher: Signe Kirde

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2.5
The Contents
2 INTRODUCTION
cosmological patterns described in Sr (130ff.) match with Ts, chapters II-IV.
Generally speaking, we might assume that Pkt. /Skt. jiva is one of the most important words in Indian religious thinking. It denotes either the "sentience", the "consciousness" of a sentient being, the "personality", the "essential principle of human nature", and the base of the "continuous" mundane existence as individual. Let us agree with Howard Smith that few words are more "ambiguous" than the words "soul" and "self"26 "In its primary meaning it ["soul") seems to designate an entity distinct from the body, the principle of life, thought and action in man, the source of the psychical activity of the individual person. The soul is assumed to exist as a spiritual substance in antithesis to material substance. Thus soul and body are contrasted and thought to be separable." In the Jain doctrine we find a concern for the principle of sentience, which is examined under several aspects or standpoints. One Jain approach to define jiva relates to another term, Skt. upayoga.
Jain authors consider upayoga to be the cognitive function, the function of consciousness of the sentient being.27 In Ts II.9 upayoga is reflected with respect to two sub-categories, knowledge and intuition. The innate qualities of the jiva are more or less identified with the cognitive function. Moreover, its natural qualities are mentioned together with three other terms: the control of the activity of speech (vag-gupti), the control of the activities of the body (kāya-gupti), and the control of the activities of the mind (manoqupti). These kinds of restraint are not reserved for the mendicants, but are applied to the ethics of the layman, too (Williams 1963:32). Vasunandin mentions uvaoga in Sr (15) as one category of the substance (jiva-davva). This category is explained in the Dig. commentaries with the help of the fourteen-fold patterns of the mārgana-sth. (See Chapter II, below).
The second approach to define sentience stands in relation to the Jain categories, the seven Tattvas. In Jain texts, Pkt. jiva denotes a "sentient being", a "living entity", a "principle of life" (MW: p. 422 "living, existing"; "personal soul"), and especially in Jainism, jiva has been often translated into English soul, but Tatia 1994:6 renders Ts 1.4 jivajiva into English "souls [sentient entities and non-sentient entities". The authors of the medieval
26 Howard Smith 1958:165 discusses the concepts of personal identity and transmigration in some exemplary passages in Chinese classical literature.
27 See for instance in Umāsvāmin's Ts, chapter II. The term upayoga has been translated various times. For instance cf. the English translation: "attention" (Jaini 1920:58 on Ts II.8-9); "cognition" (Jaini 1979:104); "sentience" (Tatia 1994:39 on Ts II.8-9); "sentient application" (Tatia 1994:44 on Ts II.19) and German: "geistige Funktion" (Jacobi 1906 on Ts II.8-9). See also Butzenberger 1989: 209-216, 306, note 300; Varni 2004:, Vol. III, p. 298. The special problem of sentience of plants in Indian thinking is discussed in Wezler 1987; Schmithausen 1994a; Hara 2003.
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