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JAINISM
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which is purely material. No material substance has given any evidence of having possessed intelligence; it might have done so when there was life in it, but without this it has no intelligence. That intelligence is, we are quite sure, influenced by material things, but it does not arise from the material things. Persons of sound intelligence take a large dose of some intoxicating drink and the intelligence will not work at all. Why should this material thing influence the immaterial, the soul? The soul thinks that the body is itself and therefore anything which is done to the material self is supposed by the real self to be done to itself. That is where the Christian scientists and the Jaina philosophy will agree; that if the soul thinks that the body is real self anything done to the body will be considered by the soul to be done to the soul, and therefore what happens to the body will be felt by the soul; but if the soul for a moment thinks that the body is not the self but altogether different and a stranger to the soul, for that reason no feeling of pain will exist; our attention is taken away in some other direction and we do not know what is passing before us. This shows that the self is something higher than the body. Still under ordinary circumstances the soul is influenced by the body, and therefore we are to study the laws o
4. This statement is worded somewhat loosely; for according
to the Jaina, even when occupied by soul the body does not come to possess intelligence; what it becomes then is an 'instrument of the intelligent activities undertaken
by soul'. 5. Christian Science' was a prevalent Western cult of
Gandhi's days. According to it, the physical bodies possess no real reality, the only real realities being the souls. Gandhi agrees with this view only to the extent that according to him too the physical body does not influence that soul which refuses to be influenced by this body but not to the extent of denying the very reality of the physical body.
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