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A CRITIQUE
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organisms known to us, organs such as brain, heart and stomach tissues of skin, muscle etc and the biological atoms called cells are all made up from the audārika group When the life becomes extinct the lifeless body that is left behind is audarika sarira il either becomes food for some living beings or else rots putrefies and decomposes into its constituents
Bodies of celestial and infernal beings are made up from ‘vaikriya' group The traditional Jain term for the word 'celestial beings is devas or heavenly people According to the Jain belief, sun, moon, stars etc, are one of the four categones of devas viz , jiotiška deva meaning light-radiating or luminous deva The life-spans of devas, though very very long compared to human beings are nevertheless finite and at the end of the life span a soul of deva leaves his lifeless vaikriya body behind It is however believed that the stuff making up the vaikriya body does not rot or putrefy like the audārika body but disintegrates rapidly into its components A varkrnja body does not cast a shadow
Science also considers sun moon, planets and stars celestial or heavenly bodies Sun is nothing else but a star; planets are members of the solar family and revolve round it in definite orbits and moons are satellites of the planets So the most important heavenly bodies are stars And they are no longer pin points of inscrutable light but objects of the individual personalities Stars are 'born' and they 'die' Their life span is of the order of 50 000 to 1,00,000 million years Our sun, for example, was born some 5000 million years ago and quickly came to age assuming the characteristics it has today for another
