IB World Religions 1.9.3. Where Are We Going? Rebirth and the Liberation of the Jiva Notes

1.9.3. Where Are We Going? Rebirth and the Liberation of the Jiva

The four destinies

1. Jains hold that a jiva leaving one body takes another immediately, and that the karma it carries decides which. The tradition sorts the possibilities into four gatis, destinies.
2. The four are birth as a heavenly being (deva), as a human (manushya), as an animal or plant (tiryancha), and as a hell-being (naraka).
3. Favourable and unfavourable rebirth are settled by conduct, not by a judgement passed on the soul. Violence, deceit and greed bind papa, demerit, and carry the jiva downward, while restraint and non-violence bind punya, merit, which is lighter and shorter-lived.
4. Heavens and hells here are long but temporary. A soul born as a deva enjoys an enormous span of pleasure and then, its merit spent, is reborn somewhere else.
5. The hells are described in similarly concrete terms, with cold, heat and mutual violence, and they too run out.
6. Only from a human birth can the cycle be left. Jains hold that devas are too comfortable to renounce anything and hell-beings too tormented to think, so the human destiny is the one from which liberation can be attempted.

Moksha and shedding karma

1. Moksha is the liberation of the jiva from the ajiva: a soul separated from every particle of karmic matter and never embodied again.
2. Reaching it takes two movements at once. Samvara stops the influx of new karma, and nirjara wears away the karma already bound.
3. Karma is exhausted in two ways. Some ripens and falls away in the ordinary course of a life, and some is burned off deliberately through austerity.
4. When the last particle is gone, the qualities Jains attribute to every soul stand unobstructed: infinite knowledge (ananta jnana), infinite perception, infinite bliss and infinite energy.
5. Nothing is added at liberation. Jains describe moksha as an uncovering, since those qualities were the soul's own throughout and were only obscured.
6. There is no return. A soul with no karma left has nothing to draw it into a body, so Jains hold that liberation is permanent.

The siddhas

1. A liberated soul is a siddha, an accomplished one. Since a jiva is naturally weightless once its karma is gone, Jains hold that it rises to the very top of the universe.
2. There it rests at the siddhashila, the crescent-shaped region at the summit, in the company of every other liberated soul.
3. Siddhas keep their individuality. Jains do not describe liberation as absorption into a greater being, and each siddha remains a distinct soul with its own infinite knowledge.
4. Siddhas do not act, intervene or answer requests. This is why Jain devotion is understood as taking a model rather than asking a favour.
5. The Namokar Mantra, the prayer Jains recite most often, bows to five kinds of worthy being, the panch parameshthi: those already liberated and those leading others toward liberation. It names no individual at all, not even Mahavira.
6. The branches divide over who can arrive. Digambara Jains hold that a woman must first be reborn as a man, while Svetambara Jains hold that women are liberated as women and point to the nineteenth tirthankara, Malli.

The shape of the universe

1. The Jain universe, the loka, is uncreated and eternal, and is often drawn in the shape of a person standing with feet apart and hands on the hips.
2. The hells occupy the lower body, the madhya loka or middle world of humans and animals is a narrow band at the waist, the heavens fill the chest and head, and the siddhashila sits above the crown.
3. Nothing governs this universe. Jains hold that it was never made and will never end, and that its order is a matter of natural law rather than of divine rule.
4. Time moves in cycles, a descending half called avasarpini running from ease toward difficulty and an ascending half called utsarpini running back. Jains hold that twenty-four tirthankaras appear in each half.
5. The picture answers the destination question directly. Liberation is not departure to another world, it is arrival at the top of this one and remaining there.

Living toward the end

1. Most Jains do not expect liberation in this life. Lay practice aims at a better rebirth and at carrying less karma forward, while the mendicant path aims at moksha directly.
2. The lay aim is not treated as second best. A favourable rebirth is understood as one step on a very long journey, and the tradition is patient about the timescale.
3. Death is given religious form. Sallekhana, also called santhara, is a voluntary fast to death taken up when the body can no longer support a religious life.
4. Jains distinguish it sharply from suicide. It is declared openly, permitted by a teacher and carried out in a calm state of mind, since dying in fear or anger would bind the very karma the practice exists to avoid.
5. The practice is contested outside the community. A 2015 ruling of the Rajasthan High Court treated it as suicide and banned it, Jains argued that a religious discipline had been misread, and the Supreme Court of India stayed the ruling.
6. Behind all of this lies a single direction of travel. Jains hold that the jiva is going somewhere, that no god will carry it there, and that the remaining question is how the journey is made.