Jain karma

Karma as matter

The Jain account is materialist in a way no other Indian tradition's is. Karma is composed of fine particles pervading space, drawn to a soul by its activity and bound there by passion. The soul in itself is omniscient and blissful; what it lacks is not power but clarity, which the karmic accretion obscures as cloud obscures the sun. Liberation is therefore a matter of removal rather than acquisition.

Activity of body, speech and mind causes influx, and passion — attachment and aversion — causes the influx to stick. This distinction matters practically: action performed without passion binds only lightly and falls away, which is why the tradition treats intention and mental state as decisive rather than the outward act alone.

The categories

Jain systematic texts classify karma in great detail, conventionally into eight main types. Four are held to obscure the soul's essential qualities: knowledge-obscuring, perception-obscuring, deluding, and obstructive. Four determine the conditions of embodiment: lifespan, body, status and feeling. Each is subdivided further, and the resulting scheme, elaborated in the Karmagrantha literature and in the Digambara Satkhandagama, is among the most intricate in Indian thought.

Stopping and shedding

Two processes end bondage. Samvara is the stopping of new influx, achieved through the vows, restraint, and carefulness in movement and speech. Nirjara is the wearing away of karma already bound, achieved principally through austerity, which the tradition holds burns off accumulated matter faster than it would exhaust itself.

This is why asceticism occupies the position it does in Jainism. Where other traditions may treat austerity as preparation or as one path among several, Jain doctrine gives it a direct physical function in the removal of karmic matter, and the fourteen stages of the gunasthana ladder describe the soul's ascent as this removal proceeds.