What is Jainism

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

Page 59

RELIGION AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
is not made up of parts is thus not liable to fall to pieces, and is actually immortal for that reason. The soul, then, is immortal in its own right.
Jainism pushes further with the study of the soul-nature, and discovers it to be the substance of consciousness. The arguments which support this conclusion cannot be stated in a short lecture, like this, where the vast number of points to be dealt with curtail, still further, the limit of time, that may be allotted to them individually, to the shortest possible duration ; but I will just mention one reason which is rather striking. When you perceive an object you can see that the sensory stimulus which co nes from the outside is not knowledge, but only matter or energy in some form. Yet knowledge is evoked thereby in the perceiver. Now, whence comes this knowledge ? Surely, not from the without, but only from the within ! For knowledge is not a thing of matter at all, but only one's feeling of awareness of things ! This is sufficient to show that knowledge merely expresses the nature of the knower. An English thinker, Prof. Bowne, also came to the same conclusion which he has set out in his work on Metaphysics. Kant, the great German thinker, too. found himself forced to recognize the fact that certain forms of knowledge were given à priori in the consciousness of the perceiving individual. The soul, then, is an intelligent substance, in its nature. Now, because the soul is a substance, and because the attributes of substances do not vary, it follows that every soul has the same capacity with respect to knowledge. In other words, what one individual knows is capable of being known by all individuals. On fuller amplification, this only means that every soul has the capacity to acquire a knowledge of all things that were ever known to any one in the past, that are known to any in the present, and that will ever be known to any one in the future. In short, knowledge unlimited by time and space resides potentially in the soul-substance itself and needs only expression to be actualized.
The next great attribute of the soul that Jainism lays stress on is happiness. It points out that apart from the forms of pleasure usually known to us there is another kind of happiness which is the natural pulsation of the soul-substance. The soul is a conscious