What is a living thing!?

 What is a living thing!?  

Jīva, Consciousness, and the Limits of Inquiry  

What is “Living”? 

According to popular definitions — and common sense — the characteristics of “life” are often listed as follows: 

1. Survival — ingestion, excretion, respiration, and circulation — essentially, the body’s regulatory systems. 

2. Consciousness — response to stimuli: fear of predation and pain, hunger for prey and pleasure, the tropism of plants toward light and water, the erect stance in gravity, neuronal and hormonal signalling, courtship behaviour, recognition of seasons for flowering, withering, and mating — all forming part of the biological rhythm. 

3. Reproduction — growth, pleasure, and the passing of genes for the long-term survival of the species; an expansion of being through time, space, and matter. 

4. Evolution — mutation, variation, and adaptability. (Though this is sometimes debated, since even non-living entities undergo structural change under external agents.) 

Five other criteria to classify an entity as “living” are often proposed: 

1) Cell 
2) Gene 
3) Information 
4) Chemistry 
5) Evolution 

A working description might be: “A living thing is a bounded chemical–informational and hereditary system with variability, endowed with a purposive drive to adapt and evolve within its circumstances through selection and change.” 

By invoking information, purpose, and intra-somatic communication, we tacitly acknowledge a seed of sentience even in the simplest life-forms. Phrases like “purpose,” “ensuring gene flow,” “adapting best,” “fear of predation,” or “sensing prey” hint at a fundamental desiderative substrate — Desire. 

This echoes an ancient note from the Ṛgveda (Nāṣadīya Sūkta): “kāmas tad agre samavartatādhi manaso retaḥ prathamaṃ yad āsīt” — Desire arose in the beginning; it was the first seed of the Mind. Yet a question remains: does the elimination of desire amount to negating life itself? 

And yet, Vedānta distils the entire phenomenon of life — Jīva — into three ineffable words: 
Sat–Cit–Ānanda — Existence, Consciousness, Bliss. 

The What, the How, and the Why of life.  

Vedāntic Anatomy of the Living Being 

The body, together with the karmendriyas (five organs of action) and the five prāṇas — Prāṇa (respiration), Apāna (excretion), Vyāna (circulation), Samāna (digestion), and Udāna (evolutionary uplift or buoyancy)  — serve as instruments for Sat, existence. The jñānendriyas (five sense organs), manas (the mind as receptacle), buddhi (the discriminative faculty), chitta (memory), and ahaṃkāra (individuation or ego) serve the Jīva for Cit, consciousness. 

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad even speaks esoterically of the Jīva as having nineteen limbs (5 + 5 + 5 + 4) in the states of wakefulness and dream. The upastha (reproductive organs), rasa (hormonal essence), and hṛd-ākāśa (the inner void of the heart) become the mediums for Ānanda, bliss. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad declares: 

Raso vai saḥ — Rasa m hyeva ayaṃ labdhvā ānando bhavati. 
“He is verily Bliss. By attaining that Essence, one becomes blissful.” And further: Yadeṣa ākāśa ānando na syāt — anantam hi ānandaḥ. 
“If there were no bliss in this vast ākāśa, none could exist. For the Infinite alone is bliss.” 

To expand, to pervade all of space and time — that is Ānanda.  
On the material plane, the Jīva fulfils this through reproduction, the urge to expand and fill the void. 
That same ākāśa — emptiness — manifests as longing, companionship, sexuality, orgasm. In the moment of release, everything ceases; the body stills, thought dissolves, silence reigns. The infinite peeks through. 

Jīva and the Age of Automation 

Perhaps, even in the era of Artificial Intelligence, the same Vedāntic triad applies. 
Our checklist for life might read: 

• Can it survive, given the resources and conditions? 

• Can it respond to stimuli? 

• Can it reproduce its own kind? 

Viruses, as we learned painfully after 2020, hover on the boundary — capable of survival and replication, yet their responsiveness to stimuli remains ambiguous. Research continues, as ever, to chase the mystery of what it truly means to be alive. 

The Limits of Enquiry 

Such questioning — “Who created what? Who witnesses whom? How do we know that A is true?” — can continue endlessly. 
There is no final wall to prevent the regress of causes. 
Cynicism, therefore, is the easiest philosophical stance, for it demands no defence — only the next question. While Ātma-vicāra (self-enquiry) is lauded in spiritual traditions and indeed takes us far along the path, beyond a point, such questioning collapses under its own weight. Perhaps this is why the Buddha, too, remained silent to certain metaphysical inquiries.