कर्म

Karma

Not a ledger kept elsewhere but a subtle physical substance that adheres to the soul through action, obscuring qualities the soul already has.

Jain karma is material. This is the point at which the Jain account diverges most sharply from the Hindu and Buddhist ones, and it is not a metaphor that hardened: karma is held to be a form of extremely fine matter, karmic particles that are drawn to the soul by activity and bind to it in a way that is described in physical terms — quantity, duration, intensity, and the specific effect each kind produces.

What the karma does is obscure rather than punish. The soul’s own nature is infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss and infinite energy; karma covers those the way a cloth covers a lamp. Liberation is therefore not the acquisition of anything but the removal of what was added — which is why the tradition can hold that every soul is already, in its own nature, what it is trying to become.

Eight main types are counted, in two groups. The four destructive ones — obscuring knowledge, obscuring perception, producing delusion, obstructing energy — cover the soul’s own qualities, and their destruction is omniscience. The four non-destructive ones determine feeling, lifespan, body and status, and they run out at liberation. The distinction explains a claim that otherwise sounds strange: an omniscient being still has a body and still dies, because the second group has not finished.

The mechanism has two halves and they are the whole of practice. Asrava is the inflow of new karma through activity; samvara is stopping it, by vow and by restraint. Bandha is the binding of what has come in; nirjara is wearing away what has already bound, principally through austerity. Everything the tradition asks anyone to do is one of these two operations.

Passion is what makes karma stick. The tradition is explicit that the same act performed with attachment or aversion binds heavily and performed with equanimity binds lightly, which is why intent and state of mind matter to an account that is otherwise physical.