Spirituality Studies 73 Nishit Shah particles, understood as inherently dynamic and governed by processes of aggregation, separation, and transformation. Unlike jīva, which is characterized by consciousness, pudgala is entirely non-sentient. As a “substance” (Sa. dravya), pudgala is eternal and uncreated; its “modes” (Sa. paryāya) – including karmic states – change without altering its substantial identity. The soteriological significance of pudgala emerges most clearly in the Jain doctrine of karma. Jain philosophy maintains that karma is not understood merely as moral evaluation or psychological tendency, but as a form of extremely subtle “karmic matter” (Sa. karma-pudgala) that becomes associated with the soul. Through this material association, the soul’s intrinsic qualities – knowledge, perception, bliss, and energy – become obscured to varying degrees, giving rise to embodied existence and rebirth (Dundas 2002, 99–103). Rather than anticipating modern scientific theories of matter, Jain conceptions of pudgala articulate the ontological conditions under which material causation interacts with consciousness, grounding karmic causation in a law-governed metaphysical framework. 2.3 Guna and Paryāya: Modal Obscuration and the Possibility of Liberation If karma is conceived as material to account for the persistence and removability of karmic effects, a further philosophical question arises: how can material karma condition the soul without compromising its essential constitution? Jain metaphysics addresses this question through the distinction between essential “qualities” (Sa. guṇa) and “modes” (Sa. paryāya). In the case of jīva, cognitive capacities such as jñāna and darśana are treated as essential qualities that are eternally present. What varies across saṃsāric (Sa. “pertaining to the cycle of rebirth”) and liberated states is not the possession of these qualities but the extent to which they are manifest. Karmic bondage, accordingly, does not negate knowledge; it conditions its expression. Ignorance and omniscience thus represent distinct modal states of the same enduring capacities rather than alterations of the soul’s essence. The philosophical weight of this distinction lies in its account of how conditioning by an ontologically different substance is possible. Within the dravya-guṇa-paryāya framework, modes are not internal states generated by a substance in isolation; they arise in relation to the conditions under which a substance exists, including its association with other substances within a shared “spatial field” (Sa. pradeśa). When “karmic matter” (Sa. karma-pudgala) becomes associated with the soul, the soul’s modes are conditioned by this association. The essential qualities are neither added to nor diminished; only their manifestation is conditioned. This is what allows Jain philosophers to maintain that bondage is causally real – producing genuine epistemic limitation, affective distortion, and embodied constraint – while simultaneously being ontologically reversible, since removing the conditioning factor restores the prior modal state without requiring any alteration to the substance itself. This distinction clarifies how different types of karmic matter produce different effects: distinct karmic types generate correspondingly specific modal restrictions. Knowledge-obscuring karma restricts the cognitive mode; deluding karma distorts the evaluative mode. The specificity of modal conditioning is thus matched by the specificity of the material cause, a relationship developed further in the analysis of karmic classification in Section 4.2. As specific karmic types are eliminated, the corresponding capacities manifest without obstruction – culminating, when all destructive karmas are removed, in “omniscience” (Sa. kevala-jñāna). By locating bondage and liberation at the level of modal conditioning rather than essential transformation, the guṇa–paryāya framework preserves ontological continuity while allowing for soteriological change. The same individual soul persists from the most obscured saṃsāric condition to final liberation, retaining moral responsibility throughout the process (Bajželj 2024, S25; Dundas 2002, 104–105). This framework does, however, presuppose that substances of different ontological categories – sentient and non-sentient – can enter into conditioning relations. How such inter-substance conditioning operates is addressed through the doctrines of spatial co-presence and beginningless association examined in Section 4.3.
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