The shared center — held across the tradition
Every soul is already omniscient.
Not potentially — actually, and buried. The soul in its own nature has infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss and infinite energy, and karma is the dirt on the lamp. Nothing is added by the path; something is removed.
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Non-violence is the highest duty.
Ahimsa extends to every living being — the monk sweeps the path before stepping.
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Karma is a substance.
Not a moral ledger and not a law of consequence — fine physical matter, drawn to the soul by passion and stuck there by it, with a measurable weight, duration and intensity. This is the distinctive Jain claim, and the technical literature on it runs to thousands of pages.
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Truth has many sides.
Anekantavada: every view is partial; certainty about the whole is a category error.
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Syadvada — the sevenfold answer.
Every statement is prefixed with syat, in some respect. From some standpoint it is; from some standpoint it is not; from some standpoint it is and is not; from some standpoint it is indescribable — and three combinations of those. It is a formal logic for holding partial truths without collapsing them.
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The soul is liberated by its own effort.
No god saves; austerity and care burn karma from the soul until it rises free.
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Nobody made the universe.
It has always existed and will not end. There is no creator, no first cause, no sustainer and nobody to appeal to, and Jain philosophers spent centuries arguing the case against Hindu and Buddhist theists in detail — chiefly that a creator would need a motive, and any motive implies a lack.
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The Tirthankaras cannot help you.
A liberated soul is out of the system entirely — no body, no location in the world, no perception of it and no capacity to act in it. The tradition states this flatly and then worships them anyway, because the veneration works on the venerator. It is one of the more intellectually honest arrangements in religion.
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Life is everywhere, and it is graded.
Souls occupy earth, water, fire, air and plants with one sense; worms with two; ants with three; bees with four; humans, animals and gods with five. The whole ethic follows from the count — you may not avoid killing one-sensed beings, but you may weight your life to kill fewer and lower.
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Time is a wheel with no beginning.
Six ascending ages and six descending ones, turning forever. We are in the fifth descending age; things are getting worse, liberation from here is no longer possible, and the next Tirthankara is a very long way off. The tradition's account of the present is unusually bleak and it does not soften it.
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The soul is the shape of the body it fills.
It expands and contracts to fit — an elephant's soul fills an elephant, an ant's fills an ant, and the same soul does both across lives. It is not a point and not everywhere; it is exactly as big as what it is currently living in.
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Ahimsa reaches past the act.
You are bound by doing it, by causing it, and by approving it — through mind, speech and body, which makes nine combinations, and the texts enumerate all nine. Intending harm binds karma whether or not anything happens, which is why the vows are about the interior as much as the hands.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Whether a woman can be liberated from a woman's body.
Svetambaras say yes and hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara, Malli, was a woman. Digambaras say no — liberation requires complete nudity, nudity is not possible for a woman, and a female soul must be reborn male first. This is the sharpest doctrinal division in Jainism and it has never been resolved.
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