Jiva

MIND, MATTER AND GOD : JIVA, JADA AND ISVARA
M.M.NINAN
There is no complete agreement among scholars and Buddhist traditions regarding the
dates of the historical Buddha. The most common dates among Buddhists are those of
the Theravāda school, 623-543 B.C.E. From the middle of the 19th century until recently,
Western scholars had believed the dates of the Buddha to be ca. 560-480 B.C.E.
However, after the publication in 1991-2 of the proceedings of the international
symposium on the date of the historical Buddha held in Göttingen in 1988, the original
consensus on these dates no longer exists.
Although there is no conclusive evidence for any specific date, most current scholars
locate the Buddha’s life one hundred years earlier, around the fifth century B.C.E. Some
of the new dates for the Buddha’s “death” or more accurately, for his parinirvāṇa are: ca.
404 B.C.E. (R. Gombrich), between 410-390 B.C.E. (K.R. Norman), ca. 400 B.C.E. (R.
Hikata), ca. 397 B.C.E. (K.T.S. Sarao), between ca.400-350 B.C.E. (H. Bechert), 383
B.C.E. (H. Nakamura), 368 B.C.E. (A. Hirakawa), between 420-380 B.C.E. (A. Bareau).
The Buddha rejected the existence of a creator deity. To Buddha the creation as we
experience daily, whatever its substances were existed without a beginning. The
universe has many dimensions in the universe which were not necessarily material as
we think about matter and were all filled with sentient beings. They may not have the
material body as humans but they have other bodies that are made of the ‘substance’
typical of the world they live in. Buddhism often calls them as devas or gods.
Depending on the sphere of existence they have special abilities and powers. However
all beings in all spheres of universe are subject to cause effect relationship and
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