The Jain 1988 07

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

Page 94

A SCIENTIFIC
ANALYSIS EVIL
OF
This is not, you may say, a very promising title for an article in THE JAIN. Some, indeed quite a lot, of ancient Jain religious texts are pretty obscure and very heavy reading even in modern translation. The reader needs badly the help of the many modern commentators who have edited such texts and added voluminous commentaries, often many times the length of the original. Gommatsara Karma-Kanda is just such a text. An edition of this work, with translation into English and a very full commentary and explanation of the difficult text was published in 1927 in Lucknow as Volumes 6 and 10 of the series Sacred Books of the Jains. This modern version is by Jagmandar Lal Jaini who performed a noble task in making at least moderately understandable a text which is characterised by A.K. Chatterjee in his Comprehensive History of Jainism as 'frankly unreadable'! The work had already been translated into Hindi in the eighteenth century AD. The author of the Karma-Kanda was Nemichandra (one of several Jain authors of this name) and he lived at the latter part of the tenth century AD. He is said to have been a friend of the minister and general Camundaraya who had the colossal statue of Bahubali or Gommata carved at Sravana Belgola. Nemichandra belonged to the Digambar sect.
THE
Jain___
The Karma-Kanda is really the second part of a larger book. The Jiva-Kanda, the first part, is a treatise on the soul or jiva. The Karma-Kanda deals, as its title suggests, with the nature of karma and its effects on the soul. The pure soul is immaterial, it has no material substance. By contrast, karma is seen by the Jains as having material qualities. It is a particularly fine kind of material particle, incapable of being perceived by the senses, which has the capacity to become attached to the soul. The pure soul thus is fettered or tied to worldly existence. Evil is material, in the sense that evil occasions the binding of (certain kinds of) karma to the soul. Thus an analysis of karma can be seen in one sense as an analysis of evil. Hence J.L. Jaini describes this book as 'a scientific analysis of evil'.
It is not intended here to give an account of the doctrine expounded in this frankly unreadable text but to point out some of the difficulties which are put in the way of the scholar who seeks to work on the old Jain writers. Happily not all are so difficult as this one. Jain writers had what may seem to some as a mania for classification. Every conceivable thing is analysed and sub-analysed into numbered categories. Basically, this book tells us (but not very clearly unless we have the help of the commentary) that there are eight kinds of karma, classified according to their effect on the soul. Four are destructive, four are nondestructive. Thus one variety of karma, when it is attached to the soul, has the effect of obscuring the soul's faculty of knowledge. A second obscures perception, a third leads to delusion (wrong belief or conduct), a fourth is obstructive in that it obstructs the normal operation of the living being. Those are the four destructive kinds. The others are the ones which determine the soul's destiny in the next life, whether as a denizen of the hells, as an animal, a human or a celestial being; the kind of body entered by the soul; the type of family; and the feelings undergone. If this sounds complicated, it is! But this is only the start. Each of the eight categories of karma is further analysed. Whilst there are only two kinds of feeling karma, those producing pleasure and those producing pain, there are no fewer than twenty-eight deluding ones and ninety-three body-making. Indeed it is said that even these may be subdivided further into innumberable categories.
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