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
water for the movement of fish. When a fish swims, the movement is due to an operative cause present in itself. Nevertheless, swimming would be impossible without the presence of water.
Similarly, when a moving object, living or non-living, comes to rest, it is necessary to have the presence of an opposite principle. Such a principle, determining rest, is adharma dravya. This also is a non-operative condition of rest. A moving object coming to rest is the result of an operative condition present in itself. A bird must cease to beat its wings so that its flight may come to a stop. But the stopping of activity requires a further condition. A bird ceasing to fly must perch on the branch of a tree or on the ground. Just as the branch of a tree or the ground serves as a non-operative condition of rest, the presence of the adharma principle serves as a condition for the moving objects to come to rest.
Without these two principles of dharma and adharma, there would be no definite structure of the world. The cosmos would disintegrate into primordial atoms, which might spread throughout the whole of infinite space. There would be no distinction between loka and aloka; the world and the beyond. There would be no permanent constitution of the world. Without constancy in the structure of the world, there would be nothing left but chaos. Hence what sustains the world as world, and what prevents the disintegration of the world into a chaos, is the presence of these two principles.
The last dravya is kāla or time. In Jaina metaphysics, time is a necessary category of existence. The whole world consisting of matter and soul is in a process of change, either evolution or involution. Changes involving growth and decay constitute the very nature of the concrete world. The process of change without time would be unintelligible and must be dismissed as illusory. Since the concrete world cannot be dismissed as illusory, the category of time must be postulated as a necessary condition of change. Kala dravya consists of moments or kala-paramāņus which constitute a time series having only the relation of before