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A SOURCE-BOOK IN JAINA PHILOSOPHY
knowledge of the self.1 Yajnavalkya said that all things of this world, all the animals, all the wealth, the son, the wife and the husband are all because of the ätman. It is therefore, necessary to know the ätman. We should meditate on the ātman.2
PRE-VEDIC TRADITION : ŚRAMAŅA CURRENT OF THOUGHT
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In this way, the discussion about the nature of the atman has been copious and all the theories regarding the nature of the atman have been discussed in the Upanisads. However, before the composition of the Upanisads, there was, in India the Śramana current of thought which was prevailing much before the Aryans came to India. The Śramana current of thought was full developed and had its own philosophy and it was primarily spiritual and secondarily worldly in outlook. This was the pre-vedic and non-vedic current of the thought. But we find that sufficient attention has not been given to the study of the pre-vedic Śramana current of thought, although the prominent conceptions of this current of thought like nirvāņa and karma and ascetic life have been assimilated in the general stream of Indian thought.
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JANMANTARAVĀDA (THEORY OF RE-BIRTH)
fal.3
There are many schools of philosophy which advocated the reality of infinite number of individual souls. Each of them presented its thought from a specific point of view.
All our activities have their after-effects. These after-effects constitute the karma. The karma has to be exhausted or experienced and there is no escape from it. If it is not possible to exhaust the karma in order to be pure-self in this life, we have to postulate the existence of life after death and a series of life as a consequence of the necessity of explaining the bondage and the destruction of the continuing karma that affects the soul. This has given rise to the theory of rebirth and of the other world. The question was very often asked: 'What would be the nature of the self after the destruction of the body and where would the self go?" On this difficult problem, there
1 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up., 2, 4, 3,
2 Ibid, 4, 5, 6,
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