ABSTRACT
Jainism denies the existence of a First Cause, or creator of the universe. In fact it regards the belief that the cosmic universe had a definite beginning in time as illogical and unthinkable, for that belief involves the further belief that a God, noncreative before creation, suddenly changed his mind and became creative. Great emphasis is placed by Jainism, as by all other Indian schools of thought, upon human birth as a means to the attainment of divine perfection. According to the orthodox Hindus as well as the Jains, gods are embodied beings, higher in the scale of evolution than man but like man subject to birth and death. Jainism may be called pluralistic realism, since it asserts the reality of both spirit and nonspirit as eternal and uncreated substances, these being many in number and existing independently of one another.
