What is Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

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10
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
when? The Jainas object to these questions, as they are liable to cause confusion of thought and to confound the real point. The proper question is truly only : what is this world ? The investigator in put. ting the question about a beginning parts company from actuality, and starts from a point which has never been experienced by himself or by any one else ; for no one has ever seen the beginning of the world, nor is it even a possibility of mental conception, since he who will conceive it will have to get rid of the existing actuality, namely, concrete nature, before he can place himself at a point in the current of time in the past when the world was still to be born. Let a man try to do this in thought and he will soon perceive that it is simply impossible to conceive of any rational method with which to effect the total disappearance or destruction of that which is a reality of existence to-day. And if it is impossible to think that this world can ever be totally destroyed in the future, it must be equally impossible to think that it could have ever been destroyed in the past. In different language, the world we live in and perceive must have existed yesterday as fully as it exists to-day, and also, and in the same manner, and for the same reasons, the day before yesterday, the day before that, and so on and so forth, till we find ourselves plunged into the bewildering domain of what is implied in the infinity of time that is known as the past. The conclusion we arrive at, then, is that there never was a moment of time in the past when the world might be said to have had no existence; that is to say, in different words, that the universe we live in is eternal. The question,
Who made it ?,' then, is one which never can arise in rational metaphysics.
The next question is, what does this eternity of the world signify, since we perceive changes going on all round us? It was this aspect of things which led Buddha to regard all things, without an exception, as evanescent and impermanent.
But it is obvious that a notion like this can never find support in science or philosophy, inasmuch as the law of conservation of matter and energy which has been very accurately determined by modern Physics is there to demonstrate its falsehood. Substance for this reason has to be defined as a permanent subject of changing