Jain psychology describes the moral condition of an unliberated soul through the doctrine of lesya, coloration, a scheme assigning six symbolic colors to six grades of psychic and karmic disposition, a diagnostic classification of a soul's present moral state rather than a fixed attribute.
The six lesyas, ranked worst to best, are traditionally described through a parable: six travelers, hungry and lost, come upon a fruit tree, and their proposed methods of obtaining food reveal their lesyas. The one who proposes uprooting the entire tree exhibits the black lesya, the most violent disposition, characterized by intense passion, cruelty and disregard for consequence. Progressively less destructive proposals, cutting the trunk, cutting large branches, cutting small branches, and picking only fallen fruit, correspond respectively to the blue, grey, fiery-red and yellow lesyas, each marking a reduction in violence and self-interest. The traveler who proposes simply gathering fruit already fallen exhibits the white lesya, the calmest and most refined disposition among the six, though even it remains a condition of the unliberated soul, since lesya applies only up to a certain stage of advancement and falls away as the soul approaches omniscience.
Jain texts correlate lesya with the intensity and duration of karmic bondage: a soul colored by a darker lesya binds karma more intensely and longer than one colored by a lighter lesya even performing an outwardly similar act, which gives the doctrine practical weight, locating moral responsibility partly in the psychological quality of an act's motivation rather than its external form, a Jain parallel, reached independently, to the emphasis other traditions place on intention over outward conduct.