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Bliss as an Attribute of the Soul :: 157
fact that a feeling is cognized and a cognition can be left proves the separate identity of the two. “Feeling is an intermediate state of consciousness that occurs between cognition and conation. It is related to both knowledge and will. On one hand, cognition serves as the stimulus for feeling, while on the other, feeling stimulates will. In a different way, feeling can be considered as the effect of cognition, and at the same time as the cause of conation.”! The conception of sense-feeling does not at all identify it with sensuous perception on the ground of the community of the instrumentality of senses. The senses, as the Jaina recognizes, are not only the instruments of cognition; but they are also the instruments of conation. They can also be held to be the instruments of affection. Just as the sensuous and perceptual types of knowledge must be tied to the given directly or indirectly, so also "the physical and mental pleasures are both of the sensory type, they depend on the functioning of the senses or on the recollections of the functioning of the senses. The same is the case with pain. It is either actual or imagined, that is, the product of memory or imagination in a train of thought. Beyond the senses neither pleasure nor pain is able to extend."2 Knowledge and feeling differ in their appearance also. Feeling appears in the form of pleasure or pain while knowledge appears in the form of experience of an object. Feeling is the object of liking or disliking as the case may be, knowledge in its pure state is above these subjective considerations."3 Thus feeling is a distinct phase of mental life, and it must have some structural truth behind it. It means that the affective manifestations of the self must be determined by some dispositions lying in the structure of the self. To use Jaina terminology the soul must have some capacity to bring about the affective manifestations, just as the cognitive manifestations are determined by the knowing capacity of the soul.
1. M.L. Mehta: Jaina Psychology, p. 113 2. C.R. Jain: Jaina Psychology, p. 26 3. Indracandra: Epistemology of Jaina Agamas, p. 211
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