Book Title: Studies In Umasvati And His Tattvartha Sutra
Author(s): G C Tripathi, Ashokkumar Singh
Publisher: Bhogilal Laherchand Institute of Indology
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106 Studies in Umāsvāti fundamental than permanence and substance. He pictures the basic components of reality as interrelated as dynamic events. He rejects the atomist view of reality as unchanging particles that are merely externally rearranged.11
Plato says that it is the definition of being that it exerts power and being subject to exertion of power, can we imagine being to be devoid of life and mind, and to remain in awful unmean-ingness an everlasting fixture ?12 Plato wrote in the Sophist, that not being is itself a form of being.13 Perishing is assumption of a new function in the creative advance of the universe. 14
The Mind: In the Tattvārthasūtra15, it is said that the worldly souls fall into two groups, souls that possess a mind and souls that do not. In the sūtrals, it is said that those that have a mind are intelligent beings. In the Jaina view, the psychic mind creates a physical mind which is made of very subtle matter.
The scientists are confident that genetics and biology will account for all aspects of human life. The mind will be precisely explained as an epiphenomenon of the normal machinery of the brain. According to Whitehead mind and consciousness are found only at higher level. Consciousness occurs only when there is a central nervous system. Consciousness and mind are radically new emergents in Cosmic history. Whitehead does not attribute mind and mentality to lower-level entities, but he does attribute at least rudimentary forms of experience to unified entity at all levels.1? This is exactly the view of Jaina philosophers.
References 1. IAN g. Barbour, Religion and Science, Harper, San Francisco 1997. 2. Tattvārthasūtra, 5.21. 3. Professor Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 207. 4. Ibid, p. 97.
