ABSTRACT
This rather obscure passage, problematic both for us and Buddhaghosa, is difficult to interpret and allows for a range of possibilities. Nevertheless, we can clearly see that the Âjîvikas saw the world as inhabited by a wide range of living beings reborn again and again in an immense number of ‘wombs’, or places of origin (P./Skt. yoni, Pkt. joòi; ‘there are 1,400,000 primary types of births from womb, 6,000 and 600’), which is a feature shared with Jainism, albeit the classifications are quite divergent. This classification must have included various kinds of rebirths in nether worlds and heavens as well as various kinds of reanimations as animals and plants. An indication that the Âjîvikas maintained that plants also have souls and one can be reborn as a plant is the story of the sesamum shrub (Viy4 15.59-59, 72-73; vide supra, p. 23 ff.) which expressly speaks of the seven sesamum-flower living beings (satta tila-puppha-jîvâ), or ‘living beings inhabiting sesamum flowers’, which were subsequently reanimated in the shrub. In itself this is of most interest because, unlike all other traditions in India, except perhaps for the earliest Buddhism,130 the Jainas and the Âjîvikas would stand out as those who accepted that plants were also sentient beings, being an integral part of the saôsâra circle of rebirth. The evidence we have at our disposal is too meagre to determine whether it was the Âjîvikas who influenced the Jaina worldview or vice versa, or whether both traditions drew from some earlier tradition, now lost. Another such unresolvable similarity between both systems is an attempt to provide a possibly comprehensive and
detailed classification of living beings according to the places of their births (‘there are 7 types of birth as a conscious being, 7 types of birth as an unconscious being, 7 types of birth from grasslike nodes; there are 7 types of divine beings, 7 types of humans, 7 types of malignant spirits’), though the actual enumerations may have differed.
