A Universe Without a Creator: The Jain View of God

Among the major religious philosophies of the world, Jainism holds a striking and unwavering position: there is no creator God. The universe was never made, for it has always existed and will always exist. It is beginningless and endless, uncreated and indestructible, sustained by nothing outside itself. To the Jain mind the very idea of a divine architect who fashioned the cosmos from nothing, and who governs and will one day end it, is not merely unnecessary but incoherent. The six eternal substances suffice to account for all that is; adding a creator explains nothing and raises more difficulties than it solves.

Jain thinkers argued the case with characteristic rigor. If God created the world, what was the motive? A perfect being lacks nothing and can have no unfulfilled desire prompting creation. If God created out of playfulness or need, then God is not perfect. If the world requires a maker because it is an effect, then God too, being a being, would require a maker, and one is led into an infinite regress. And if a benevolent, all-powerful God made the world, whence comes the suffering, cruelty, and injustice that fill it? Far simpler, the Jains concluded, to recognize that the universe operates by its own eternal laws, that substances behave according to their own natures, and that the moral order is upheld not by divine decree but by the impersonal working of karma.

This does not make Jainism an atheistic philosophy in any bleak or reductive sense. It is more precise to call it transtheistic. Jainism denies a creator and cosmic ruler, but it affirms divinity of another and higher kind. The divine, for the Jain, is not a being who stands outside the world dispensing reward and punishment, but the perfected state that every soul may attain. Godhood is not a monopoly of one supreme being; it is the birthright and destiny of the soul itself, realized when the soul frees itself entirely from karmic bondage.

Two categories of exalted beings hold the place that a god occupies in other faiths. The first are the Arihantas or Tirthankaras, souls who have conquered their inner enemies, attained infinite knowledge, kevala jnana, and, having crossed the ocean of rebirth themselves, teach the path to others while still embodied. The second are the Siddhas, the fully liberated souls who have shed the last of their karma and their bodies and dwell forever at the summit of the universe in perfect knowledge, perception, bliss, and energy. These are the true objects of Jain veneration. When a Jain bows before the image of a Tirthankara, it is not to petition a creator for favors, for the liberated grant no boons and answer no prayers, but to honor and to contemplate the ideal of the perfected soul, and to strengthen the resolve to walk the same path.

The consequences of this theology are far-reaching. Because there is no God to appease, salvation cannot come by grace, sacrifice, or divine intervention. Each soul must accomplish its own liberation through its own effort, right faith, right knowledge, and right conduct, purifying itself of karma by discipline, austerity, and above all the practice of non-violence. Responsibility is total and undelegated; no one can save another, and no one is saved from without. The universe offers no shortcuts and plays no favorites; it simply reflects, with perfect impartiality, the moral quality of each being's own deeds.

In this vision the dignity of the soul is raised to its highest pitch. There is no gulf between the human and the divine that only a creator could bridge, for the divine is what the soul essentially is once its obscurations are removed. Every jiva, even the humblest, carries within it the latent perfection of a Siddha. The whole endeavor of the Jain religion is to awaken souls to this truth and to lead them, by their own labor, to the godhood that was always theirs.