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Practice of Brahmavihăra in Theravāda Buddhism
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a thin transparency, a distance, a nothing. Now when I say “I”, it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well.... And just what is Antoine Roquetin? An abstraction. A pale suddenly pales and fades out. Lucid, static, forlorn. Consciousness is walled-up it perpetuates itself. No body lives there any more. Now nothing left but anonymous walls anonymous consciousness. This is what there is : walls and in between the anonymous walls, a transparency, alive and impersonal consciousness, superfluous, which dilutes scatters itself on the objects but never forgets itself.12
Man is nothing, is a famous quote of Sartre, by which he means that man is not a thing, never complete, always in the mode of possibilities, as it is said that “what consciousness is what it is not and consciousness is not what it is.” This is how consciousness is proved to be nothing. Sartre also gives the various criteria on the basis of which, he proves consciousness is not what it is and consciousness is what it is not. These criteria are body, temporality; freedom etc. According to Sartre man's existence is absurd because of his contingency finds no external justification. His projects are absurd because they are directed toward an unattainable goal (the "desire to become God” or to be simultaneously the free for itself and the absolute in itself, which is complete and neither active nor passive). Here Jainism provides the way to come out of this absurdity and illuminates the way of trinity-right knowledge, right attitude and right conduct through which one can be God. This insists that consciousness desire to become God is not absurd. Consciousness in its pure state is itself God, which is neither active nor passive. Thus there exists a possibility in consciousness of Jainism, where all possibilities come to an end, where as for Sartrean for-itself no such possibility is possible. For Sartre, only possible characteristic of For-itself is to be in mode of possibilities the possibilities, which has no end.
Thus by nothingness he proves that consciousness ec-sists (to be outside oneself). Consciousness exists in the sense that it is
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