जीव और अजीव

Jiva and ajiva

Everything that exists is either soul or non-soul. Souls are innumerable and individual, and are found in beings most systems do not count as alive.

The primary division is between jiva, that which has consciousness, and ajiva, that which does not. Souls are innumerable, individual, and none is an aspect of any other — there is no universal soul here that individual souls are portions of, and this separates the Jain account cleanly from Vedantic ones.

Souls are graded by the number of senses their body has. One-sensed beings have touch only, and the category includes beings of earth, water, fire and air as well as plants; from there the count rises through two-, three- and four-sensed creatures to five-sensed animals, humans, hell-beings and celestial beings. Every one of them has the same capacity for liberation, and this classification is where the wide reach of ahimsa comes from.

Ajiva has five categories, and together with jiva they make the six substances that constitute the universe. Pudgala is matter, which has the property of being combinable and divisible; karma is a fine form of it. Dharma and adharma are not ethics here but the media of motion and of rest — that which makes movement possible and that which makes stillness possible, present everywhere like water for a fish. Akasha is space. Kala is time, and whether it is a substance at all is one of the points on which the traditions do not fully agree.

Dharma and adharma in this technical sense have no counterpart in other Indian systems, and they exist to answer a specific question: if the universe is finite in extent and motion is possible, what bounds it? The answer given is that the medium of motion extends only so far, and that is what makes the inhabited universe finite.