Dr. Samani Mangal Pragya
The believers in the creator God uphold that the world order is controlled and maintained by Iśvara (Creator God). Jain philosophy does not accept this concept of creator God or almighty God as a controller of the world.[1] It believes in the functioning of some self-operated universal laws and the world-order is maintained by them.
The order of universe is an expression of those universal laws. Ten laws for the operation of this universe have been mentioned in Sthānāṅga Sūtra:
- Living beings (worldly souls) repeatedly die and reborn at the same place.
- Worldly souls always undergo the bondage of karmas.
- Worldly souls always undergo the bondage of inauspicious karmas and deluding karmas.
- Living substances never become non-living and non-living beings never get transformed into living beings.
- Mobile beings will never get absolutely extinct. The whole class of mobile beings can never turn into immobile beings or all immobile beings can never be extinct and the whole class of immobile beings can never transform into mobile beings.
- Cosmos will never be trans-cosmos and trans-cosmos will never be cosmos.
- Cosmos will never enter into trans-cosmos and trans-cosmos will never enter into cosmos.
- So far as there exists cosmos, living beings also exist in it and vice versa.
- So far as there is motion of soul and matter, there is cosmos and vice versa.
- All the material entities, that occupy the boundary (end) of loka (cosmos), spontaneously become rukṣa (assume negative electricity) in spite of remaining abaddha-aspriṣṭha (i.e. non-bound and non-touched) by the other rukṣa material entities, and hence jīva (soul) and pudgala (matter) are not capable of going outside the cosmos.[2]
Sthānāṅga is a numerical text and the facts included in this text go from one to ten. There are many universal laws about jīva, karma, rebirth etc. in āgamas. Collection and explanation of these facts may become a subject of further research.
