Akasha: Space and the Boundaries of the Cosmos

Space, akasha, is one of the six eternal substances of Jain metaphysics and the most vast of them all. Its defining function is to provide accommodation, to give room, avagahana, in which every other substance can exist. Souls, matter, the media of motion and rest, and time all subsist within space; space alone requires nothing to contain it. Formless and imperceptible, without color, taste, smell, or touch, akasha is known not by the senses but by inference from the plain fact that things occupy places. It is the ultimate container of reality.

What distinguishes akasha most dramatically from the other substances is its infinity. The souls of the universe are innumerable, the atoms of matter are countless, dharma and adharma each fill a bounded region, but space is literally without end, extending infinitely in every direction. To make sense of this immensity in relation to a finite inhabited world, Jain thinkers drew their most important cosmological distinction: the division of space into lokakasha and alokakasha.

Lokakasha is the space of the universe, the cosmic region in which all activity takes place. It is precisely that portion of infinite space which is pervaded by the media of motion and rest, dharma and adharma, and which therefore contains all souls, all matter, and all events. Everything that exists, acts, is born, lives, dies, and is reborn does so within the lokakasha. It is finite in extent, and the classical texts describe its distinctive shape at length, likening the cosmos to a figure broad at the base, narrow at the waist, and widening again above, often visualized as a standing human form with hands on hips.

Beyond this inhabited world lies the alokakasha, the non-universe space, an infinite emptiness that surrounds the cosmos on every side. Here there is nothing but space itself. No soul, no atom, no medium of motion, no time exists in the aloka. Its perfect emptiness follows from the doctrine of dharma and adharma, for since those media are confined to the lokakasha, nothing can move or rest outside it, and therefore nothing can be there at all. The alokakasha is space in its purest and most solitary condition, an endless void that no thing will ever enter.

Jain philosophy conceives space as composed of pradeshas, indivisible space-points, each the room occupied by a single ultimate atom. These points are the units by which the extension of substances is measured. A single atom of matter occupies one pradesha; a soul, though a single substance, can expand or contract to fill many, occupying as few or as many space-points as its embodiment requires, much as a lamp's light fills a small room or a large hall. This capacity of the soul to pervade variable space is essential to Jain theories of embodiment and rebirth.

The doctrine of akasha carries a quiet philosophical dignity. Space is uncreated and indestructible, neither made by a god nor capable of destruction. It does not act and cannot be acted upon; it simply is, the passive ground of all coexistence. Yet its division into loka and aloka gives the Jain universe its precise architecture: a finite, self-contained world of souls and matter, bounded not by a wall but by the limits of motion, floating within a shoreless ocean of empty space that stretches on forever. In grasping akasha, the student of Jain cosmology grasps the frame within which the whole drama of bondage and liberation is set, and understands why the summit of the inhabited world, where liberated souls come to rest, marks the very edge of everything that can ever be.