But the process of entanglement in activity and
enjoyment is beginningless. The soul gets entangled in the samsara and
embodied through the operation of karmas. It assumes various forms due to
the materially caused conditions (upadhi), and is involved in the cycle of
birth and death. It is subjected to the forces of Karmas which express
themselves, first through the feelings and emotions and secondly in the
chains of very subtle kinds of matter, invisible to the eye and the
ordinary instruments of science. When the soul is embodied, is affected
by the environmental-physical, social and spiritual, in different ways.
Thus we get the various types of soul existence. The soul embodies itself
and identifies itself with the various functions of the bodily and social
environment. Willaim James distinguishes between the self as known or the
me, the empirical ego as it is sometimes called, and the self as knower or
the I, pure ego. The constituents of the me may be divided into three
classes: the material me, the social me and the spiritual me. The body is
the innermost part of the material me. Then come the clothes, our home and
property. They become parts of our empirical ego with different degrees of
intimacy. A man's social me is the recognition that he gets from his
fellowmen. A man has as many self as there are individuals and groups who
recognize him. The spiritual me also belongs to the empirical me. It
consists of the entire collection of con-sciousness, my psyche faculties
and dispositmll taken concreate." But the pure self, the sell as the
knower, is very different from the empirical sell. It is the thinker, that
which thinks. This is permanent, what the philosophers call the soul or
the transcendental ego.[34] James Ward also makes a distinction between
the self known or the empirical ego, and the pure self. For him, the
empirical ego is extremely complex. It is the presented self. ' The
earlies element is the presented self, the bodily or the somatic
consciousness. But they never have the same inwardness as "the sense of
embodiment." We also find a certain measure of individual permanence and
inwardness that belongs to the self. We may call this 'the sensitive and
the appetitive self. With the development of ideation there arises what
we call the inner one, having still greater unity and permanence. This is
the imaging and desiring self. At the level of interaction, we come to the
concept that every intelligent person is a person having character and
history and his aim in life through social interaction. This gives
conscience, a social product as Adam Smith has said. At this stage a
contrast between the thinker and the object of thought is clearly formed.
This is the thinking and willing self. At this stage,
even the -inner ideation and desire become outer, no longer strictly self.
The duality of subject and object is the last order of knowledge and is
the indispensable condition of all actual experience. It is the subject of
experience that we call pure 'ego or self.[35]
The Jaina thinkers made a distinction between the
states of the soul as bahiratman, antaratman and paramatman. Bahiratman
consists in the identification of the sell with body and external
belongings. It is the bodily,self. In this we say, "I am the body, I am
lean etc." This identification is due to ignorance. The same soul is in
the karmavastha and is characterized by suddha caitanya and bliss. It is
free from all sense of other ness. It has discriminative knowledge. This
conscious self is antaratman in the samyagdrsti gunasthana. The pure and
perfect self which is free from that impurities of Karma is the paramatman.
It is characterized by perfect cognition and knowledge. It is freed and is
a Siddha. This Paramatman is jnanamaya and is pure consciousness. It
cannot be known by the sense. It has no indriyas and no manas. From the
noumenal point of view, these are the attributes of the soul.[36] The
Jaina approach to the problem is metaphysical. It contains elements of
psychological investigation; but the language is the language of
metaphysics. modern psychologists, especially the rational psyshoiogists,
stopped at psychological analysis and explained the process of realizing
the pure nature of the self from the empirical stage to the stage of pure
ego. But the transcendental self is not the subject of psychology. William
James has said that states of consciousness are all that psychology needs
to do her work with. 'Metaphysics or theology may prove the existence of
the soul; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial
principle of unity is superfluous.[37]
Jainism refers to the size of the soul. Although so are
not of any definite size, they contract and expand according to the size
of the body in which they are incorporate for the time being. The soul is
capable of adjusting its to the physical body, as the lamp placed in a
large or small room illuminates the whole space of the room. Nemicanc
describes it as the phenomenal characteristic of the soul From the
noumenal point of view it is said to exist in innmerable pradesas.[38] In
respect of the elasticity of the so Jainism differs from the other schools
of Indian thought as Jacobi says, the Jainas have a tenet of the size of
the so which is not shared by other philosophers.[39]
Some philosophers like the Vaisesikas, Democritus; the
atomists, thought of the soul as atomic. Some others talked of the
omnipresence of the soul. Jacobi says that original Vaisesika was not
clear on this point. Some Samki writers preferred the soul to be
infinitely small, while Isvara Krsna and later writers characterized it as
allpervading.[40] The spatial view of the habitation of the soul had
occupied the minds of the Upanisadic philosophers.
Upanisadic psychology agrees with the Aristotelian
localizing the soul in the heart. It was later thought that was in the
brain. Yogic and Tantric books recognized the cerebro-chemical processes,
and consciousness was traced, to the brain. In the
Taittirlyopanisad (1. 6. 1. 2) were that the soul in the heart moves by a
passage through the bones of the palate, right up to the skull, where the
hair are made to part. The soul in the heart is called manomay, In the
Kausltaki Upanisad the soul is described as the master of all bodily
functions. The sense depends on the soul a 'relatives on the rich'. The
self is immanent in the whole body, and is hidden in it. This passage
leads to the view like the Jaina view, that the soul fills the body.
Different other accounts are given in the Upanisads. In the Brhadaranyaka
the self is described as small as a grain of rice or barley. In the
Kathopanisad we find that the soul is of the size of the thumb.[41] It
dwells in the centrer of the heart. In the Chandogya, it is said to be of
the measure of the span between the head and the chin. William James
traces the-feeling of self to the cephalic movements. He says that the
self of selves when carefully examined is found to consist mainly in the
collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and
the heart.[42] Descartes maintains that the seat of the soul is the pineal
gland. Fichte holds that the soul is a space filling principle. Lotze says
that the soul must be located somewhere in the matrix of the arterial
brain events. These accounts tend to make us believe that the soul is
something material which occupies space. It is sometimes pointed out that
the idea of the spatial attributes of the soul constitutes a
contradiction. If the soul has no form it cannot occupy space, even the
infinite pradesas; and if it is immaterial, it cannot have form. However,
this contradiction is due to the difficulties of expressing the immaterial
in terms of the material. This has been the perennial problem of
philosophy, because the immaterial has no vocabulary of its own. The
Greeks had the same difficulty. Plato had to resort to allegories and
myths for expressing the immaterial. In Jainism, although the description
of the soul is not metaphorical, it is just an attempt to come nearest to
immaterialism. It may be that the difficulty is due to the complexity of
substance in Jainism. Jainism gives the cross division of substances as
spiritual and non spiritual, and again as corporeal and non-corporeal
substance like Dharma and Adharma; and there is the corpo real which is
called Pudgala. From the phenomenal point of view, jiva comes under the
spiritual but corporeal. The corporeal need not necessarily be material.
The classification is as follows:-
Substance
________|___________
|
|
spiritual
non-spiritual
|
|
corporeal
______________________
|
| |
Jiva
corporeal n-corporeal
|
|
matter 1. Akasa
2. Dharma
3. Kala
If this division is accepted, there need be no
contradiction. Again, when size is attributed to the soul, it is possible
that it refers to the sphere or extent of the influence that is intended.
In the Pancastikayasara we read that just as a lotus hued ruby, when
placed in a cup of milk, imparts its lustre to the milk, the soul imparts
its lustre to the whole body. [43]
Jiva is characterized by upward motion. Nemicandra
describes the pure soul as possessing urdhvagati. In the Pancastikayasara
it is said, when the soul is freed from all impurities it moves upwards to
the end of Loka.[44] For Plato, the soul was, above all, the source of
motion. It is only the self that moves. In the Phaedrus, Socrates says in
his second speech, "The soul is immortal for that which is ever in motion
is lmmortal." The self r ever ceases to move and it is the fountain and
the beginning to motion to all that moves. the movement of the soul in
samsara is due to its association with Karman; but by nature it has the
upward motion which it adopts beyond which no movement is possible in pure
space which is devoid of the medium tormotion. The Jaina conception of the
soul as possessing urdhvagani appears to be more an ethical expediency
than a metaphysical principle or a psychological fact.
All these attributes belong to the nature of every soul
and they are clearly seen if the Jivas are pure and free. However, most of
the Jivas are not pure and free. They are contaminated by some foreign
elements which veil their purity and perfection. The foreign element is
karman, very fine matter, imperceptible to the senses, and which enters in
the soul and causes great changes. The souls are then involved in the
wheel of samsara. They become samsarins.
III. The samsari jivas are classified on the basis of
various principles, like the status and the number of sense organs
possessed by them. They are sthavara jivas, immovable souls. This is the
vegetable kingdom. Sir J.C. BOSE has pointed out that the vegetable world
has capacity for experince. They are one-sensed organisms. Earth, water,
fire and plants
are such jivas. They possess the sense
of touch. This view is peculiar to Jainism. Trasa jivas,
(moving souls) have two to five senses. Worms, oysters. conches etc.,
possess taste and touch. Ants, bugs and lice have three sensestaste,
touch, smell and sight. And birds, beasts and men have all the five
senses. Again, five sensed organisms may possess mind. They are called
samanaka. They may be bereft of mind (amanaska).
Plato talked of a determined number of souls. 'The
souls that exist must always be the same. They cannot become fewer, nor
yet cant hey become more numerous'.[45] In the Timaneus he said that the
number of souls is equal to the number of the stars.[46]
