The Jain 1988 07

Author(s): Natubhai Shah
Publisher: UK Jain Samaj Europe

Page 84

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JAIN CULTURE
1. INTRODUCTION Culture is the sum total of man's learned behaviour in a society. How a Jain behaves in a radically different society such as in European society can bring out his individual makeup more clearly. How does he react to affluence and permissive elements? How does he react to ever increasing modern developments? How does he combat racial prejudices? How does he give his children a Jain culture especially where there are very few Jains or their preachers? How does he convince others of 'Jainness' when he himself, at the most, has been trained through rituals only? We briefly answer these questions after introducing the foundation of Jainism in the modern context. 2. SCIENCE AND THE FOUNDATION OF
JAINISM To call Jainism simply a religion is a misrepresentation since it tries to give a unified scientific basis for the whole cosmos including 'living and non-living' entities. Thus it is a holistic science which encompassess everything. In Jains scriptures it has been emphasized that 'knowledge comes first and then compassion'
(Desá-vaikālika-sutra, verse 10, Ch. 4) This is consistent with one of the greatest scientists of this century, Albert Einstein, who maintained
'Religion without science is blind, Science without religion is lame!
The main contributions of science in this era and their parallels to Jainism are as follows: 1) Particle Physics and Quantam Physics. It
is only in this century that technology has advanced to the point where atomic processes and elementary particles may be studied and understood in detail. However, it is interesting to note that Jains had formulated their ideas presumably one step further by evolving the concept of karmic particles (Karmons). Whether such particles exist or not may be debatable but it is interesting that they fit in well with a self-regulatory universe and the life in it. Quantum physics is very much probabilistic. In some cases it is very near the probabilistic Jaina principle of Syadvad. The principle is partly a probabilistic principle connected with the reductionistic principle of science. Jain would complement this principle with the holistic principle Anekantvad. At present, science is moving within these two
principles. 2) Evolution. One of the greatest
achievements of the biological science of the last century has been the evolution theory of Darwin. It is interesting to note that through the density of karmic matter in living species, one goes beyond evolution of any theory of Darwin, and tries to encompass the whole of creation. It tries to answer the fundamental question of evolution of life as an individual mechanism.
3) Exchangeability of Matter and Energy.
One of the most revolutionary ideas of Albert Einstein was the claim that matter can be converted into energy and vice versa, i.e. matter and energy are exchangeable. This concept has been with Jains for centuries. The word that is used is Pudgala to describe the matter. Explicit in this word is that matter and energy are the
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