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THE JAINA PHILOSOPHY
5000 million years it will continue to be in the prime of life After that it will expand and burn away fiercely for 2000 million years and begin to shrink and decline to a long old age After 50000 millionyears it will have turned black and heatlessi e dead The bodies of the star are made up of primordial gas and dust, more than half of which is hydrogen which is transformed into helium by nuclear fusion The process of nuclear fusion converts matter into energy. which is radiated The amount of hydrogen steadily decreases while that of helium increases When the entire stock of hydrogen is used up there is nothing to burn The star becomes black and heatless and dies Thus the life span of this celestial object starts from a cloudy birth and ends into frozen extinction Thus, if the star is a jyotişka deva! then the stellar dust is the stuff belonging to the raikriya group
Ahāraka sarira is not a common body It is very occasionally created by learned sages only taijas sarira and kārmana sarira are the supersubile bodies assimilated by every soul from the stuff of the appropriate group They are permanent companions of the soul, and are abolished only if and when the soul is emancipated taijas sarira is the link between the soul and the kārmana sarıra It is the source of energy required by the vital processes of all living organism As its name suggests, taiļas stuff is probably electrical (or electromagnetical), and the electrical characteristic manifested by the bodies of living organisms are caused by the taljas sarra
We naye briefly described the functions of kārmana sarira in the previous chapter and we can hardly
19 This statement should not be construed as a belief of the Jains nor that of the author It is merely a conjecture emanaung from circumstanual similarues
