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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
518
Ātman and Moksa
adorned with infinite, supremely excellent and wonderful qualities -- splendour, beauty, fragrance, tenderness, loveliness, youthfulness, and so on. And in order to gratify his devotees he individualises that form so as to render it suitable to their apprehension, he who is a boundless ocean as it were of compassion, kindness and lordly power, whom no shadow of evil may touch — he who is the highest Self, the highest Brahman, the Supreme Soul, Nārāyaṇa (arcizo).”
The same Brahman thus transforms itself into the sentient centres, the individual souls (jīvas) and the matter. The individual souls are centres of consciousness and both the individual souls and the inanimate objects (praksti) form the body of the Isvara. They are therefore, the emanations of the Supreme Self. In the inert material things the consciousness (fara) and bliss (PT ) are absent, and in the jiva existence (T) and consciousness (FC) are present but the bliss (Bara) of the Brahman is absent. The jivas and the inanimate objects are in essence the Brahman though they differ in their external forms. Therefore, the Brahman is called the Is'vara qualified by cit and acit (facfalafetė87:). The individual soul (jiva) is separate for each body and is of the atomic nature, self-luminous and eternal. The soul is the doer but its agentship is controlled by is'vara. There are three kinds of jivas -(i) the bound (a) -all the phenomenal (saṁsārin) souls
1 Rāmānuja-Com. on Vedānta Sūtras. Tr. Thibaut, 1.1.21, p. 240.
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