Studies in Jainism

Author(s): Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture Culcutta
Publisher: Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture Culcutta

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STUDIES IN JAINISM
JĪVA TATTVA The soul, by itself, is imperceptible, but its presence can be found out by the presence of its characteristic qualities in a material body. Its chief characteristic is consciousness, which is accompanied by sense activity, respiration, and a certain period of existence in a particular body. There is an infinite number of such souls in the universe, and they retain their individuality throughout, neither destroying it altogether nor merging it in the individuality of any other superior being. In their embodied state, they are divisible into two classes, the immobile (sthāvara) and the mobile (trasa). The former are of five kinds, according as their body is made up of earth, water, fire, air, or vegetable substance. The first four are very subtle forms of life, while the fifth is gross. All these five classes of beings have only one sense developed in them, that is, the sense of touch, responding thereby only to a stimulus of physical contact.
There is a class of beings still lower than these, calle the nigoda or group-souls, in which an infinite number of beings have a body and respiration in common. They infest the whole world, not excluding the bodies of men and other animals. They are slowly evolving and serve as a regular supply for replacing beings that pass out of the cycle of birth and death by the attainment of nirvana.
The mobile (trasa) class of beings is also divided into four kinds, according as they possess two, three, four, or five senses, i.e. the senses of taste, smell, sight, and sound,
dition to that of touch. Oysters are examples of the two-sensed beings; bugs and lice of the three-sensed; mosquitoes, flies, and bees of the four-sensed; and birds, animals, and men of the five-sensed beings. Amongst the last kind, again, there are beings, like men and most of the animals and birds, that possess sarjñā or a faculty to discriminate between the beneficial and the injurious, between the favourable and the unfavourable, while there are some, like a particular kind of reptile in the ocean, that possess no such faculty.
Consciousness being the characteristic of a soul, knowledge is inherent in every living being, but its stage of development differs. Knowledge derived from the observa