The Doctrine of the Jainas, Described after the Old Sources c9.14

c9.14

Among the plant souls or *vaṇassai*¹-*kāiya* we also find the *nigoya* or *nioya-jīva*. Jambūdv. 171 a; Vy. 309 a explain *nigoda* by *kuṭumba*, which makes us think of *nyoka(s)*. As mentioned above, the *nigoya* (Viy. 889 b—Jiv. 423b; Viy. 764 b; Pannav. 381 a) are both fine and concrete. Originally, however, the name is certain to have belonged to the former (*suhuma*) only. This is explained not so much by the word of *nigoya* (without an adjective) standing side by side with *bāyara-n*. (Pannav. 381 b) than by an objective exceptional position. The above mentioned ∞ number of plant souls goes to the debt of the fine ones among them; they alone may stay for an infinitely long time in the same form of existence, whereas the remaining fine elemental beings (to say nothing of the higher ones) can leave it, at the latest, after an indeterminably long (*a*), i.e. after all a measurable time (Pannav. 377a, 381b). This is the so-called *kāya-ṭṭhii*, the uninterrupted sequence of existences having the same form (§ 93), i.e. existences each of which ends within one *muhutta* in a fine form in the elemental beings and plants regardless of either their complete or incomplete development (Pannav. 171b). Hence the fine undeveloped *nigoya*, though it pertains to the Saṃsāra, yet does not take part in the up and down within it, until it starts to develop. By this way it is the intellectual and actual counterpart of the Siddha (§ 101). The Canon does not supply us with any detailed information about a certain way as to how the *nigoya* fill up the entire world. It is most probably a post-canonical conception acc. to which these *nigoya* form in *n* numbers into *n* minute balls (*gola*) each having *∞* souls—which for their part permeate all and everything.¹ Pannav. 39a speaks of an *aya-gola* only by way of comparison.