________________
MAN AGAINST NATURE
7. Mokșa: “release.”
"Jīva and non-jīva together constitute the universe," we read in a Jaina text. “If they are separate, nothing more is needed. If they are united, as they are found to be in the world, the stoppage and the gradual and then final destruction of the union are the only possible ways of considering them.” 08
The Jaina universe itself is indestructible, not subject to periodical dissolutions like that of the Hindu cosmology."9 Furthermore, there is no hint of that primal, world generative sacred marriage of Father Hcaven and Mother Earth which constitutes a major theme in the tradition of the Vedas. In the great Ilorse Sacrifice (aśvamedha) of the ancient Indo-Aryans, when the chief queen as representative of Mother Earth, the spouse of the world-monarch (cakravartin), lay down in the sacrificial pit beside the slaughtered animal that was symbolic of heaven's solar force (the horse having just ended its triumphant solar year of untrammeled wandering),100 that act of the qucen was the mystical reconstitution of the sacred cosmic marriage. But in Jainism the primal male (or the primal female) is the universe. There is no history of a gestatory coming into existence, no "golden germ” (hiranyagarbha), no cosmic egg which divides into the upper and lower half-shells of heaven and earth, no sacrificed and dismembered primeval being (puruṣa), whose limbs, blood, hair, etc., become transformed into the constituents of the world; in short, no myth of creation, for the universe has always been. The Jaina universe is sterile, patterned on an ascetic doctrine. It is an all-containing world-mother without a mate, or a lonely man-giant without female consort; and this primeval person is forever whole and alive. The so-called "up-going” and “down-going" world
son Tattvārlhādhigama-sútra 4. (Sacred Books of the Jainas, Vol. II, p. 7.) 09 Cf. Zimmer, Myths and Symbols, pp. 9-22. 100 Cf. supra, pp. 134-135.
275
