Here is your Essay on Bondage of the Soul

Bondage means, in Indian philosophy in general, the liability of the individual to birth and all consequent sufferings.

This general conception of bondage is differently interpreted by the different systems in the light of their ideas of the individual and the world. The suffering individual, for the Jaina, is a jiva or a living, conscious substance called the soul.

This soul is inherently perfect. It has infinite potentiality within. Infinite knowledge, infinite faith, infinite power and infinite bliss, can all be attained by the soul if it can only remove from within itself all obstacles that stand in the way.

Just as the sun shines forth to illuminate the entire world as soon as the atmosphere is freed of cloud and fog, similarly the soul attains perfection when an obstacle which infects the soul and overpowers its natural qualities is removed.

In other words, the limitations that we find in any individual soul are due to the material body with which the soul has identified itself.

The body is made of particles of matter (Pudgala), and for the formation of a particular kind of body, particular kinds of matter- particles are to be arranged and organised in a particular way.

In the formation of this body, the guiding force is the soul’s own passions. Roughly speaking, a soul acquires the body that it inwardly craves for.

The karma or the sum of the past life of a soul its past thought, speech and activity generates in it certain blind cravings and passions that seek satisfaction.

These cravings in a soul attract to it particular sorts of matter-particles and organise them into the body unconsciously desired.

The soul with its passions or karma forces is, therefore, regarded by the Jaina as the organiser of the body, the efficient cause of it, whereas matter (Pudgala) is said to be its material cause.

The organism which the soul thus acquires consists not simply of the gross perceptible body, but also the senses, manas, the vital forces and all the other elements which curb and limit the soul’s potentialities.

The body that we have inherited from our parents is not a mere chance acquisition. Our past karma determines the family m which we are born as well as the nature of the body its colour, stature, shapes, longevity, the number and nature of sense organs and motor organs which it possesses.

While all these, taken collectively, may be said to be due to karma, taken also collective sense (of the sum total of all tendencies generated past life), each of these taken separately may be said to be due to a particular kind of karma the Jaina, therefore, speaks the much karma, and names each after the effect it produces.

For example, gotra-karma is the karma that determines the family into which high one is born; ayus-karma is the karma determining the length of life, and so on.

Similarly, we are told of the karma that clouds knowledge (jnanavaraniya), that which clouds faith (darsanavaraniya), that which produces delusion (mohanlya), that which produces emotions of pleasure and pain (vedaniya), and so on.

The passions which cause bondage are anger, pride, infatuation and greed (krodha, mana, maya, lobha). These are called kasaya (i.e. sticky substances), because the presence of these in the soul makes matter-pardcles stick to it.

As the nature and number of material particles attracted by the soul depend on its karma, these particles themselves come to be called karma-matter (karma-pudgala) or even simply karma. The flow of such karma-matter into the soul is called, therefore, influx (asrava) of karma.

Bondage, in Jaina philosophy, comes, therefore, to mean the fact that jiva, infected with passions, takes up matter in accordance with its karma.

As passion or bad disposition (bhava) of the soul is the internal and primary cause of bondage, and the influx of matter (asrava) into the soul is only the effect of it, the Jaina writers point out that bondage or fall of the soul begins in thought.

They, therefore, speak sometimes of two kinds of bondage: (a) internal or ideal bondage, i.e. the soul’s bondage to bad disposition (bhava-bandha), and (b) its effect, material bondage i.e. the soul’s actual association with matter (dravya- bandha).

The interpenetration of matter and soul (which, according to the Jaina, is the nature of bondage) would appear to be crude to some. But we should bear in mind that the soul, for the Jaina, is not devoid of extension, but co-extensive with the living body.

The soul is the jiva, the living being; and in every part of the living body we find matter as well as consciousness and, therefore, the compresence or interpenetration of matter and the conscious living substance (i.e., the soul) is as good a fact of experience as the interpenetration of milk and water in a mixture of the two, or of fire and iron in a red-hot iron ball.