Omniscience
Those who have implicit faith in the Jineshwaras do not require to experiment over the truthfulness of their words. They unhesitatingly accept their words as true beyond the pale of doubt. Our effort through this post is to establish the truth of the sayings of Jineshwaras by testing their validity on the touchstones of modern scientific discoveries. Extracted from “Science & Religion” by “Yugpradhan Acharya Sam Pujya Panyas Chandrashekhar Vijay M.S”
Evolving Understanding through Science
Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. There is a logical urgency for us to warn the readers against one popular illusion about the status of modern science and its discoveries — That it is perfect. The following cases are, but a few, that illustrate this:
1. METEORS
Ulkas, i.e. meteors have been defined in the Jain works as ‘tejaskaya’, i.e. substances with fiery bodies. Thus ‘ulka’ have been recorded as stone-like substances with embodied fire falling from the skies.
It is interesting to note that the scientists had refused to acknowledge this fact for many centuries. Like rains of less likely substances — including ”blood, milk, wool, flesh and gore,” according to historian Ursula Marvin — eighteenth-century rationalists with their fancy new scientific outlook thought the stories of rains of iron rocks weren’t real.
It was through works of many later scientists like Charles Oliver and members of his American Meteor Society that succeeded in disproving an erroneous idea about meteor showers. In his book Meteors, Charles writes :
“Mankind has now reached the second half of the 18th century. Centuries before this have seen several meteoric falls from the heavens to which many an eye-witness have given their own support with vivid descriptions of the phenomena. But the shocking fact was that even the scientists of those centuries had scoffed at the first hand knowledge of those witnesses of the meteoric falls by calling those people as idiots or ignorant.
2. THEORY OF GRAVITATION
Albert Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, contributed an alternate theory of gravity in the early 1900s. It was part of his famous General Theory of Relativity, and it offered a very different explanation from Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Einstein didn’t believe gravity was a force at all; he said it was a distortion in the shape of space-time, otherwise known as “the fourth dimension”.
After years of struggle, Einstein succeeded in showing that matter and spacetime mutually interact to mimic Newton’s naïve idea that masses attract each other. Gravity, said Einstein, actually moved matter along the curving pathways embodied in spacetime — paths imprinted by mass and energy themselves. As expressed decades later by the physicist John Archibald Wheeler : mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve, and spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move.
In the very introductory portion of the commentary on ‘Bhagavatee Sutra’, the ancient Jain work states that the cause of the stone-fall has in its grossness or materiality, the cause of the upward motion of the columns of smoke lies in its lightness or insubstantiality and that the wind’s mobility is not strictly down ward nor upward, but is mainly tangential, because of the fact that wind is both material and ethereal.
3. THEORY OF EVOLUTION (UTKRANTIVADA)
As per Darwin’s theory of Evolution, In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism’s abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.
Some scientists are pushing back against this idea, known as neutral theory, saying that genomes show much more evidence of evolved adaptation than the theory would dictate. This debate is important because it affects our understanding of the mechanisms that generate biodiversity, our inferences about how the sizes of natural populations have changed over time and our ability to reconstruct the evolutionary history of species.
The evidence for horizontal transfer of genes suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life.
The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that his theory was the only one that was true. There was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. The Jain scriptures had been very firm and clear about this point. They had affirmed in very clear terms that man and monkey or ape are two different entities. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we’ve come to think.
4. The Elementary Particles
Scientists conceived the idea that objects could be indefinitely split into halves until you were left with a single, indivisible speck of matter. This unimaginably small unit could not be divided further and was, therefore, called an “atom”, derived from the Greek word A-tomos. A for “no” and tomos for “cuttable” or splittable.
Later subatomic particles like electron, protons and neutrons were discovered. The quest to find particles even more elementary than electrons, protons and neutrons led us to build beautiful particle accelerators. When physicists first began colliding electrons with protons, they observed that electrons bounced off three small hard cores inside the proton. The cores were found to be even smaller particles that make up the proton. These elementary particles are called Quarks, and the discovery of quarks meant that protons and neutrons weren’t fundamental anymore. Quarks are the smallest entities we have come across in our scientific endeavor.
The Jain Agams describe “Paramanu” as the elementary particle. These paramanu make up everything that we know in the world through our senses of touch, taste, smell, sight or sound.
It is stated further that there is in existence two main categories of the sentient and the insentient and the latter is consisting of five categories:
- ‘Dharmastikaya’ (material substance that helps motion),
- ‘Adharmastikaya’ (material substance that helps rest),
- The space entity (“Akasham”),
- The temporal entity (“kaal”) and
- Matter (‘Pudgal’).
Thus we find all together just six substances.
The Axioms of Truth
Even today human knowledge is limited in that out of a gigantic ocean of truths, there is only a few that can be proved through the strength of modern scientific equipment. Instead of striving to prove the truth of every word, it is better to prove that the speakers of such words were themselves the very incarnations of truth.
Who were the original expounders of all the “Jinagamas”? Are their words eligible for the faith and trust of the world or not? We can reason this based on two axioms of truth:
- The first axiom is that the person stating is unbiased. Bias comes from either love or hatred towards what is being talked about. Hence, the person who is unbiased needs to be above the power of passions like love and hatred. Because wherever there is presence of this pair of passions of attachment and hatred, like and dislike, there is certainty of falsehood.
- Secondly, the soul who is admired as the truth-speaker is expected to posssess total knowledge of the topic about which his observations are accepted as truth. He should have total knowledge of the subject in all its aspects in that area of knowledge. The basic fact in the relationship of knowledgeability and freedom from passions is that only freedom from passions makes way for real knowledge.
Bhagwan Mahavir and other tirthankars are called as “Jina” which means victorious or conqueror. Conqueror of not lands or kingdoms but the sway of inner passions. Conquest not through sword or might but through renunciation and penance.
He is also known as Sarvagna, one who knows the past, present and the future of every soul and particle, clearly, every second of time.
There is a strange and unexpected agreement between the ancient and the modern points of view. This naturally leads to the conclusion that those who have visualized these truths centuries ago before the birth of science must have possessed universal omniscience and there is nothing adventurous or vain glorious in the pronounce.
