Karma in Jain teaching

Jainism's account of karma is the most literal in Indian thought. Karma is not a moral law, an invisible ledger, or a metaphor: it is a form of subtle matter, karma-pudgala, attracted to the soul by its activities and adhering to it, weighing it down and obscuring its innate qualities. The soul is by its own nature omniscient, blissful, energetic and perceptive; karmic matter covers those qualities as cloud covers the sun, and liberation is the removal of the covering rather than the acquisition of anything.

The mechanism is set out with unusual precision. Asrava is the influx of karmic matter, occurring through activity of body, speech and mind. Bandha is bondage, the actual binding of the matter to the soul, and its character is determined by four factors: the type of karma, its duration, its intensity and its quantity. What determines quantity is activity; what determines duration and intensity are the passions, anger, pride, deceit and greed, which make the soul, in the tradition's image, sticky. Samvara is the stopping of the influx, achieved by restraint, vigilance and the vows. Nirjara is the shedding of karma already bound, which happens as karma ripens and falls away of itself, or far more rapidly through austerity. Moksha is the state in which all karma has gone.

That analysis explains why asceticism occupies a place in Jainism that it holds in no other Indian tradition to the same degree: austerity is not merely purifying in a general sense but is the specific technical means of accelerating the shedding of accumulated matter.

The eight main types of karma divide into the destructive, which obscure knowledge, perception and energy and produce delusion, and the non-destructive, which determine lifespan, physical body, social status and the experience of pleasure and pain. Destroying the first four produces kevala jnana, omniscience; exhausting the remaining four ends embodiment altogether.

Two consequences distinguish the Jain view sharply. Because activity determines influx while passion determines intensity, even unintentional harm binds karma, though far less severely than intentional harm, which grounds the extraordinary care of Jain practice about incidental injury. And because the whole process is mechanical and requires no judge, Jainism has no creator and no governing deity administering consequences: the system runs by itself, and liberation is achieved entirely by one's own effort, without divine assistance and without the possibility of grace.

Jain psychology describes the moral condition of an unliberated soul through the doctrine of lesya, coloration, a scheme assigning six symbolic colors to six grades of psychic and karmic disposition, a diagnostic classification of a soul's present moral state rather than a fixed attribute.

The six lesyas, ranked worst to best, are traditionally described through a parable: six travelers, hungry and lost, come upon a fruit tree, and their proposed methods of obtaining food reveal their lesyas. The one who proposes uprooting the entire tree exhibits the black lesya, the most violent disposition, characterized by intense passion, cruelty and disregard for consequence. Progressively less destructive proposals, cutting the trunk, cutting large branches, cutting small branches, and picking only fallen fruit, correspond respectively to the blue, grey, fiery-red and yellow lesyas, each marking a reduction in violence and self-interest. The traveler who proposes simply gathering fruit already fallen exhibits the white lesya, the calmest and most refined disposition among the six, though even it remains a condition of the unliberated soul, since lesya applies only up to a certain stage of advancement and falls away as the soul approaches omniscience.

Jain texts correlate lesya with the intensity and duration of karmic bondage: a soul colored by a darker lesya binds karma more intensely and longer than one colored by a lighter lesya even performing an outwardly similar act, which gives the doctrine practical weight, locating moral responsibility partly in the psychological quality of an act's motivation rather than its external form, a Jain parallel, reached independently, to the emphasis other traditions place on intention over outward conduct.