Media of Motion and Rest: Dharma and Adharma

Among the six eternal substances of Jain metaphysics, two are especially distinctive and have no close counterpart in other philosophical systems: Dharma and Adharma. In this technical usage, the words do not mean virtue and vice, their more familiar ethical senses, but refer to two subtle, pervasive, non-material substances with a precise cosmological function. Dharma is the medium that makes motion possible; Adharma is the medium that makes rest possible. Neither causes motion or rest, but each provides the necessary condition, the enabling background, without which movement or stillness could not occur.

The Jain analysis here is subtle and worth following. A fish can swim only if there is water; the water does not push the fish, but without it swimming would be impossible. In a similar way, Dharma is understood as the all-pervading medium that permits things to move, the condition of the possibility of motion, while Adharma permits things to come to rest and remain still. These media fill the entire inhabited cosmos, the Lokakasha, and their presence is precisely what defines the boundary of the inhabited universe: beyond a certain point, in the Alokakasha, there is no medium of motion, and so nothing can move there. This is why the cosmos has an edge. Motion is possible only where Dharma extends.

This is a remarkable conceptual move. Jain thinkers recognised that motion and rest are not simply properties of moving and resting things, but require an enabling condition provided by the surrounding cosmos. They distinguished the container of things, space, from the enabler of dynamics, and they made the enabling of motion a positive feature of reality rather than something to be taken for granted. In doing so, they populated space with an invisible, pervasive substance whose role is purely to make certain physical behaviours possible.

It is here that a cautious resonance with modern physics arises. Modern physics, too, has come to fill apparently empty space with invisible entities that enable and condition physical behaviour. The concept of a field, central to modern physics, describes a pervasive condition of space that mediates forces and influences the behaviour of matter. The electromagnetic field permeates space and enables the interactions of charged particles; other fields do the same for other forces. In general relativity, the structure of spacetime itself conditions the motion of matter, determining the paths that objects follow. The old idea of space as an empty void has given way to a picture in which space is filled with active, invisible entities that shape what can happen within it.

The Jain notion of a pervasive medium that makes motion possible has, therefore, a loose kinship with this modern picture of space as filled with enabling fields. Both reject the idea of truly empty, inert space, and both grant to the background a positive role in conditioning physical behaviour.

Honesty requires firm limits on this comparison. Dharma and Adharma are not physical fields. They are metaphysical substances posited by philosophical reasoning, not mathematical entities derived from experiment and measurement. They exert no forces, carry no energy, and make no quantitative predictions; they merely enable motion and rest in a general, philosophical sense. The field concept in physics is precise, tested, and quantitative in ways that the Jain media are not, and the two arose in entirely different contexts. It would be a serious overclaim to say that Jainism anticipated field theory.

What can be said fairly is that Jain thought, uniquely, recognised that motion and rest require enabling conditions supplied by a pervasive background, and thereby rejected the notion of space as a mere passive void. That insight, that the background of physical events is not nothing but a positive, pervasive condition of what can occur, is one that modern physics, in its own rigorous and very different way, has also come to embrace.