Jain Loka

Jain tradition draws its universe as a body: the loka-purusha, a colossal figure standing with feet apart and arms akimbo, and the picture is more precise than it looks. The lower world, seven tiers of hell-lands stacked like inverted umbrellas, forms the legs, widening downward, roomier the darker they get. The middle world, thin as a waist, holds the concentric island-continents and ring-oceans centered on Mount Meru, with Jambudvipa, our continent, at the very center; only here, in a narrow zone, can human beings be born, act freely and attain liberation. The upper world swells through the chest and shoulders in tiers of paired heavens, narrowing again toward the neck, and at the crown sits the crescent Siddhashila, the abode of the liberated.

Around the whole figure lies the aloka, pure empty space where nothing, not even a god, can pass. The diagram, painted for centuries in manuscripts and temple hangings, is a teaching instrument: it shows a universe that is finite in extent yet eternal in duration, dense with beings at every level, and shaped, not accidentally, like the human form, because the human station at its waist is the only place from which its summit can be reached. Cosmology and soteriology are the same picture; a Jain looking at the cosmic man is looking at a map whose only meaningful route runs from the middle to the crown.

Jain cosmology is built on a refusal: the loka was not created, is not sustained by any will, and will never end. Jain philosophers argued the point aggressively against theistic opponents, and their arguments survive in the classical texts: a creator would need a motive, but a perfect being lacks desires and an imperfect one is no god; a creator would need prior material, which then needs its own explanation; and the regress of makers is endless unless one simply stops, in which case one may as well stop at the world itself.

The universe therefore runs on law rather than governance. Its substances, souls, matter, the media of motion and rest, space and time, are eternal; its events are the workings of karma, conceived with Jain literalism as fine material particles binding to souls; and its history moves through an endless wheel of rising and falling half-cycles, each divided into six spokes of improving or declining conditions, with no first turn and no last. Even the gods are only well-placed inhabitants, enjoying long leases in the upper stories before rebirth returns them to the middle world to seek what heaven cannot give. The scheme makes Jainism one of the few ancient traditions that is at once deeply religious and strictly non-theistic about cosmology: reverence is owed not to a maker, of whom there is none, but to the liberated souls at the summit, who show what the unmade universe nevertheless makes possible.