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86 : Śramaņa, Vol 57, No. 2/April-June 2006
by having a hierarchy of 'living beings' according to their 'sense organs'; in other words, plants being low in this hierarchy, it is 'less violent' to eat them (in order to survive?) than to eat animals.
Modern Science has arrived at a better definition nearly fifty years ago "Life (on earth) is DNA-based", which achieved a great unification, consistent with the theory of evolution (and proving, inter alia, that all life-forms are fundamentally similar and related). It is difficult to classify a virus as a living thing because it can only 'reproduce itself (by capturing the chemical factory inside a living cell), is RNA-based, and can survive indefinitely. However, plants and animals etc. are all 'living beings'. Moreover, all "life processes' involve conversion of energy, whose end-product (heat) can be observed. Prāņa (HUT) (Consciousness?, Soul ?, Sentience ?)
By any yardstick (scientific or otherwise) this is the most difficult concept to define. It seeks to capture in one word too many diverse attributes such as:
• consciousness (the sense of "I") • capacity for thought (not driven solely by instinct)
capacity for rational thought making judgments sense of future (and therefore of past) sensations and feelings (existence of sense organs) sense of self-preservation altruism social intercourse (community feeling, etc.)
During the past two hundred years, great advances have been made by Science in understanding these attributes. It has become possible since about 1990 to study ("image") the living brain in action. But the brain is quite unlike the other organs; each of its activities are distributed over several regions. Thus, 'consciousness'
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