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and prevents it from being wholly isolated from matter at death. The upward path and liberation of the soul
are effected by stopping the entrance of Karma, that is by not performing actions which give occasion to the
influx, and by expelling it. The most effective means to this end is self-mortification, which not only prevents
the entrance of new Karma but annihilates what has accumulated.
Like most Indian sects, Jainism considers the world of transmigration as a bondage or journey which the wise
long to terminate. But joyless as is its immediate outlook, its ultimate ideas are not pessimistic. Even in the
body the soul can attain a beatific state of perfect knowledge[256] and above the highest heaven (where the
greatest gods live in bliss for immense periods though ultimately subject to transmigration) is the paradise of
blessed souls, freed from transmigration. They have no visible form but consist of life throughout, and enjoy
happiness beyond compare. With a materialism characteristic of Jain theology, the treatise from which this
account is taken[257] adds that the dimensions of a perfected soul are two-thirds of the height possessed in its
last existence.
How is this paradise to be reached? By right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, called the three jewels,
a phrase familiar to Buddhism. The right faith is complete confidence in Mahavira and his teaching. Right
knowledge is correct theology as outlined above. Knowledge is of five degrees of which the highest is called
Kevalam or omniscience. This sounds ambitious, but the special method of reasoning favoured by the Jains is
the modest Syadvada[258] or doctrine of may-be, which holds that you can (1) affirm the existence of a thing
from one point of view, (2) deny it from another, and (3) affirm both existence and non-existence with
reference to it at different times. If (4) you should think of affirming existence and non-existence at the same
time and from the same point of view, you must say that the thing cannot be spoken of. The essence of the
doctrine, so far as one can disentangle it from scholastic terminology, seems just, for it amounts to this, that as
to matters of experience it is impossible to formulate the whole and complete truth, and as to matters which
transcend experience language is inadequate: also that Being is associated with production, continuation and
destruction. This doctrine is called anekanta-vada, meaning that Being is not one and absolute as the
Upanishads assert: matter is permanent, but changes its shape, and its other accidents. Thus in many points the
Jains adopt the common sense and prima facie point of view. But the doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma
are also admitted as obvious propositions, and though the fortunes and struggles of the embodied soul are
described in materialistic terms, happiness is never placed in material well-being but in liberation from the
material universe.
We cannot be sure that the existing Jain scriptures present these doctrines in their original form, but the full
acceptance of metempsychosis, the animistic belief that plants, particles of earth and water have souls and the
CHAPTER VII. THE JAINS[251] 93
Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I.
materialistic phraseology (from which the widely different speculations of the Upanishads are by no means
free) agree with what we know of Indian thought about 550 B.C. Jainism like Buddhism ignores the efficacy
of ceremonies and the powers of priests, but it bears even fewer signs than Buddhism of being in its origin a
protestant or hostile movement. The intellectual atmosphere seems other than that of the Upanishads, but it is
very nearly that of the Sankhya philosophy, which also recognizes an infinity of individual souls radically
distinct from matter and capable of attaining bliss only by isolation from matter. Of the origin of that
important school we know nothing, but it differs from Jainism chiefly in the greater elaboration of its
psychological and evolutionary theories and in the elimination of some materialistic ideas. Possibly the same
region and climate of opinion gave birth to two doctrines, one simple and practical, inasmuch as it found its
principal expression in a religious order, the other more intellectual and scholastic and, at least in the form in
which we read it, later[259]. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]