Living Systems in Jainism: A Scientific Study: 07.01 ►Introduction

No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our (embodied) existence than our emotions. Emotion is a mental activity followed by its physical expressions and actions. Western thinkers have identified emotions as a complex psycho-physiological experience influenced by the biochemical activity of the body and the environment. In Jainism, bhava is a mode of the soul that is determined by the rise, suppression, annihilation, and annihilation-cum-subsidence of psychical karma, accompanied by activity in the body in the form of physical expressions and actions. Emotion is an aspect or component of bhava. In Western models, the stimuli for emotions come from either the body or the environment; in Jainism, these are auxiliary causes for changes in the state of the soul, and the main cause of emotions is a transformation in the state of the soul due to activity in the karma body. Despite this difference, both approaches maintain that emotions/bhava involves both mental activity and physical changes in the body. In this chapter, I compare the Jain and Western ways of understanding emotions.