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224: Structure and Functions of Soul in Jainism
holding that liberation means a total cessation of pain and suffering. According to him pain and pleasure belong to buddhi or intellect and the mind, the purusa is totally beyond their reach. Actually speaking in the Samkhya system we cannot talk of the liberation of the purusa; still bondage is held to be a real fact, it is in no way a delusion. The Sāmkhya conceives another entity, born of prakṛti, which is made subject to bondage. Buddhi or mind comes very near the purusa and it so behaves that it is taken to be conscious. So it is really the bondage of prakṛti; and hence it is the prakṛti that is to be liberated. Unless the purusa in some way suffers from the bondage, liberation can have no meaning. The gain of consciousness on the part of prakṛti will not solve the problem but raise the prakṛti to the status of the purușa. Still the Sāṁkhya may be given credit for maintaining consciousness as an essential attribute of the soul and its bondage as an existential fact. On the other hand the Advaitin starts with the monism of Brahma. The entire universe is Brahma. Brahma is the only reality of the universe. At the same time it is immutable. To explain the visible manifoldness and differences of the world the principle of māyā is formulated. It causes the existence of both the individual jiva and its bondage. But the principle of māyā is not granted any reality parallel to the Brahma. Māyā and its effects are true only at the empirical level, while the empirical level has no validity as compared with the transcendental level. Thus the Advaitism agrees with the Sāmkhya in holding the immutability of Brahma or Purusa; but its bondage in his hand is reduced to a mere delusion. It does not stand parallel to the Samkhyan bondage which is an existential fact. Though Samkara assigns empirical reality to bondage, yet the conception does not gain in tenability on account of the non-est principle of māyā in the root. If the Samkhya is said to have no bondage of the purusa, the Advaitin also holds a position which is not very much different from it. The former attributes the phenomenon of bondage to the prakṛti, the latter reduces it to a delusion. In Advaitism bondage is a delusion born of another delusion.
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