Heritage of the Last Arhat Mahavira

SR No.: 001653
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Charlotte Krause
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith
Total Pages: 32
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Religion, & Devotion
File Size: 3 MB

Page 10

place is substantiated more logically than anywhere else. Moreover, Jainism (unlike various other religious systems) does not believe the soul to be completely helpless in its dependence on Karma i.e. to be hopelessly, condemned to act and react, like an automation, upon the consequences of its former deeds, and to be therefore beyond all responsibility for its moral attitude and actions. But Jainism clearly states that individual is gifted with a certain amount of freedom will: a fact which none of all the writers on Jainism has up till now, duly emphasized. And still, this tenet forms one of the most important and most complicated chapters of the doctrine of Karma, as expounded exhaustively in the Jaina Scriptures. They state, it is true, that the soul is indeed constantly under the control of Karma, that its body and its sufferings and joys are indeed shaped by Karma, and that even those passions that shake it, and all the fatal instincts that arise in it, are predestined by Karma; but, on the other hand, they most emphatically declare that the soul is endowed with the power of breaking, by its free resoluiton and activity, the most obnoxious of the fetters of this very Karma, of destroying its own evil dispositions, and of suffocating the flames of all the various kind of passion, before they can overpower it. That means nothing else but that the first and essential step towards religious activity is, according to Jainism, a pronounced act of free volition, and that the soul is indeed, to a considerable extent, the lord of its own fate.
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Thus Jainism does not torpify its followers by the terrors of Karma, nor does it make them languish in unhealthy, effeminate fatalism, as many people think all Oriental religions do but on the contrary, it trains the individual to become a true hero on the battle-field of self conquest.
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For it does presuppose a great deal of heroism on the part of the hearer, to make him fully realize the cruel irony of this play