perfectly characterless beings [1] who touch life on as few points as possible; both also agree that souls who have attained mokṣa can never again be reborn; but the great ideal of the Hindus, absorption into the Supreme, is alien to Jaina thought. The Jaina Siddha through all eternity will maintain their separate entity.[2]
Though the Christian idea of heaven is so foreign to them, the Jaina through their quick sympathy with idealsm are deeply interested in it as the thought of a fuller life, in which a man, with all his powers perfectly developed, his ideals realized, and his will absolutely attuned to the divine will, moves without let or hindrance to fulfil God’s plan for him. They note a further resemblance in the Christian śloka where the promise is given to him that overcometh (Jina) that he shall go out thence no more.[3]
They feel themselves less in sympathy, however, with the Buddhists, who seem to them to use their common word Nirvana as connoting extinction not only of desire (with which the Jaina would agree) but also of the soul itself, which they would indignantly deny.
With mokṣa, the ninth principle, the category ends. Tedious as it is, its study is essential to the real understanding of Jainism, whose scriptures declare: ‘He who is acquainted with these nine principles, and lays hold of them by faith, is perfect in knowledge. He who is ignorant of them cannot be perfect in knowledge. The word sand doctrine of all the Jain Lords is here, and nowhere else to be found; therefore, he whose mind is instructed in these, possesses true and stable knowledge. He who has had this knowledge impressed on his mind for only an hour, is detained only by half the mental and bodily attraction that he was before.’[4]
- ↑ Cp. Rev. H. Haigh, Some Leading Ideas of Hinduism, London, 1903, p. 129.
- ↑ Another great difference we have already incidentally mentioned. In the Jaina mokṣa there is no thought of escape from māyā, for the Jaina have no conception of māyā in the Hindu sense.
- ↑ Rev. iii. 12.
- ↑ J. Stevenson, Nava Tafva, p. 128
