Wheather a Tree Has a Single Soul or Many?

The short paper was published in The Jaina Gazette, Vol. XLIV, Number 4, April 1947, pp. 52-53 as an additional note of the essay on Jaina Plantology by J. L. Jaini.

Wheather a Tree Has a Single Soul or Many?

The above question has been asked by a friend in England, who has adopted the Jaina faith. He is a fruit grower, and asks that if he removes from a tree, four hundred twigs or slips or cuttings as they are called, and raise that number of trees, each having a separate existence, merely by inserting each twig in the ground, does he thereby kill only one soul or four hundred souls. The question is whether each leaf, root, bark, wood, rap, blossom, fruit, seed are separate individual souls.

The reply, and the explanation, is clear from J. L. Jaini's article on Jaina Plantology, the whole tree is one individual soul. Each leaf, seed or twig, cut away from the tree does not amount to killing the soul which vitalizes the tree. The injury caused is taint amount to injury caused to a man by cutting any limb of his. In the case of a tree, each seed, each twig, each leaf, is, as the case may be, a yoni or a birth place for a new and separate Jiva to enter it and vitalize it. In the case of a man it is not so. That would make no difference in principle. This is with reference to big trees. Some plants, however, as pointed out by J. L. Jaini, are such that each plant has numerous souls, others have only one individual soul. Again among individual souled plant, some act as hosts to numerous parasites, and others do not tolerate a parasite. The himsa caused to such plants varies in each case It is very great in the case of Sadharana or many-souled plants, such as a potatoes, or in the case of host-souled-individual-soul plants. It is limited in case of individual souled plants - Editor of "The Jaina Gazette".

With reference to the question raised by a friend in England and referred to me for opinion and elucidation, I have to offer the following explanation: -

According to Jaina philosophy, plants are divisible into two kinds, namely,

1. Plants which have a single soul without any colonies of nigod souls super-imposed upon them (apratishthita pratyeka vanaspati) and
2. Plants which have one soul with a supeiimposition of nigod colonies (sapra-tishthita pratyeka vanaspati).

Plants of the former class cannot be reproduced from twigs or cuttings, but have to be grown from the seed, or transplanted bodily along with their roots. Such are the various corns and trees. Those that could be reproduced from bits of cuttings etc. may be presumed to
belong to the second variety.

When a fruit grower cuts twigs and reproduced numerous trees, he is only guilty of deliberate violence in the same manner as a person who commits grievous hurt for a selfish purpose. He may also be guilty of destroying, unconsciously, some colonies of nigod souls due to the rough handling unavoidable in the act.

But he is certainly not guilty of any deliberate destruction of either the pratyeka soul of the parent tree which continues to live, nor of the nigod colonies which are not allowed to die out, but are carefully preserved by the fruit grower, by keeping the cuttings fresh for regrowth. - H. L. Jain