The Heart of Jainism/Chapter 1
The desire of India is to be freed from the cycle of rebirths, and the dread of India is reincarnation. The rest that most of the spiritual seek through their faith is a state of profound and deathlike trance, in which all their powers shall have ceased to move or live, and from which they shall never again be awakened to undergo rebirth in this toilsome and troubled world.
If, therefore, we would try reverently and sympathetically to grasp the inner meaning of an Indian faith, we must put aside all thought of the perfectly developed personality which is our ideal, and of the joy and zest that come from progress made and powers exercised, and, turning our thoughts backwards, face for a while another goal, in which death, not life, is the prize, cessation not development the ideal.
In Indian religions as in ours asceticism has its place, but we must remember the different connotation which that word bears to Indian minds. To the Christian, asceticism is only a means to an end, the eager, glad decision of the athlete to refuse the lower, if it clash with the higher, good. Far different is the Indian ideal, for in India asceticism has been born of fear, fear of future rebirths no less than of present ills. To Indian thinkers asceticism is the beginning in this life of the cessation they crave, and their hope is that thus one by one their powers and talents, with all that leads to and results from action, may drop off, burnt away in the glow of austerity, till only a stump of character remains, from which the soul may easily free itself. The unused gifts shrivel up the quicker if their owner be a professed ascetic, for the more limited the sympathies and the fewer sides of life a mortal touches, the better. All that makes for colour and vividness and joy in life must be sacrificed, and if through voluntary starvation life itself should go, the less risk is there of doing those actions which involve reincarnation.
To men believing thus, the life of the professed ascetic offered irresistible attractions. As such they were cut off from wife and child, and from all the labours and keen joys and sorrows these entail; clothing, food, or shelter need not claim their thought or work; houseless and effortless they might wander at will through a land of hospitality and sunshine.
To understand the creeds of India one must, of course, remember its climate: over a large part of the country, except during the rainy season, when ascetics suspend their wanderings, it is always fine: no drenching rain and (in the greater part of India) no biting frost compel men to provide themselves with houses or fires. The intense heat discourages exertion and robs men of energy, till rest seems the greatest bliss and meditation an alluring duty. And then, as we know only too well, the influence of the climate breeds pessimism eventually in the blithest European or Indian. In the east death and disease come with such tragic swiftness, and famine and pestilence with such horrifying frequency, that the fewer hostages one has given to fortune, the happier is one’s lot.[1] To the poor and unaided in ancient India justice was unknown and life and property but ill secured, just as we may see in many native states to this day. All these influences, creed, climate, pessimism and injustice, pressed men more and more towards the pathway of the professed ascetic’s life; but the door of this pathway was barred more and more firmly as time went on to every qualification but that of birth. Unless a man had been born a Brāhman,[2] he must remain in all the hurry, sorrow and discontent of the world, until his life’s end; but to a Brāhman the way of escape was always open; he must pass through the four Āśrama (or stages), and having been successively a student, a householder, and a hermit, spend the remaining years of his life as a wandering mendicant.
There must have been constant revolts against the exclusiveness that so selfishly barred the door to other castes, and echoes more or less clear of such revolts have come down to us, but only two were really permanent—the revolt of the Buddhists and the revolt of the Jaina. The Buddhists are scarcely found any longer in India proper, but the Jaina exist as an influential and wealthy community of laymen who support a large body of ascetics, the only example of the early mediaeval monastic orders of India which has survived to our day.
Both Buddhist and Jaina orders arose about the same time, the sixth century B.C., a period when the constant wars between various little kingdoms must have made the lot of the common people hideous with suffering and oppression; and a man might well have longed to escape from all fear of rebirth into such a sorrowful world, and have hoped, by renouncing everything that could be taken from him, and by voluntarily stripping himself of all possessions and all emotions, to evade the avaricious fingers of king or fortune.[3]
About this time, too, a wave of religious feeling was making itself felt in various parts of the world, and India has always been peculiarly susceptible to psychic emotions. The fact of being debarred from entering the ascetic life through the recognized stages and of being treated as in every way inferior was naturally most keenly felt by those in the caste next below the Brāhmans, the clever, critical Kṣatriya,[4] and it is from the ranks of these that the Jaina as well as the Buddhist reformers sprang.
Sacrifice was another occasion of quarrelling between the two castes. The Kṣatriya claimed that in old days they had been allowed to take part with the Brāhmans in the sacrifices from which they were now shut out; but the whole feeling about sacrifice was altering. As the Aryan invaders settled down in India, they grafted on to their original faith much from the darker creeds belonging to the lands and people they conquered, and gradually lost the child-like joy of the earlier Vedic times. The faith of the woodland peoples inspired them with the idea that all things—animals, insects, leaves and clods—were possessed of souls; and this, together with the growing weight of their belief in transmigration, gave them a shrinking horror of taking life in any form, whether in sacrifice[5] or sport, lest the blood of the slain should chain them still more firmly to the wheel of rebirth. So they came to dislike both the creed and the pretensions of their own priests, and the times were indeed ripe for revolt.
The Brāhmans declared that their supremacy and their sacrifices were based on the Vedas, so the authority of the Vedas was denied by the new thinkers. The Brāhmans claimed that the four castes had been created from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the Creator, thus ensuring the supremacy of that caste which had issued from the highest portion, i.e. the Brāhmans who came from the god’s mouth. So the reformers proceeded to deny the existence of a creator, feeling that, if that creator had existed, not only would he be responsible for the superiority of the Brāhmans but also for all the sorrows that darkened existence.
From the birth-story of their great founder one school of reformers—the Jaina—proved that it was a greater honour to be born of a Kṣatriya than of a Brāhman mother. Indeed all through the Jaina sacred books one comes across traces of this antagonism to Brāhmans and to Brāhmanic practices such as bathing,[6] divination,[7] &c., and one whole chapter, ‘The True Sacrifice’,[8] is directly written against them.
The Brāhmanic ascetic had to pass through four stages, but once the door of asceticism was forced open by rebels like the Jaina, it was opened as widely as possible, and the postulant was allowed to leap the intervening stages and become a wandering mendicant at once, if he so willed.
Having declared against birth exclusiveness, the Jaina were bound to find some other hall-mark of worth, and for this purpose they laid stress on karma. A man’s karma[9]—his actions—not his caste, they declared, was of supreme importance, but from this position they have since backslidden, as they themselves lament, and it rests with the Jaina of to-day to free themselves from the shackles of caste which they have allowed to rebind them, and once more to restate this fundamental tenet of their creed.
It must always be remembered that Jainism, though a rebellious daughter, is none the less a daughter of Brāhmanism, many of whose leading beliefs are still held by the Jaina, while much of their worship exactly resembles Hindu worship, and their domestic chaplains, though not their temple officiants, are still Brāhmans; in fact both faiths must be studied if Jainism is to be understood. One might even suggest that one of the easiest approaches to the study of the boundless creed of Hinduism would be through the study of its more clearly defined and less nebulous offspring, Jainism.
- ↑ 'Happy are we, happy live we who call nothing our own; when Mithilā is on fire, nothing is burnt that belongs to me.' Uttarādhyayana, S.B.E., xlv, p. 37.
- ↑ Some European scholars doubt this, but all the Jaina the writer has met believe it most strongly; and the aim of this book throughout is to present the Jaina point of view and to reflect current Jaina opinions.
- ↑ 'At one time, his manifold savings are a large treasure. Then at another time, his heirs divide it, or those are without a living steal it, or the king takes it away, or it is ruined in some way or other, or it is consumed by the conflagration of the house.' Āċārāṅga Sūtra, S.B.E., xxii, p. 20.
- ↑ It seems probable that the atheistic (anti-Brāhmanic) system of philosophy-the Sāṅkhya-also arose amongst the Kṣatriya. Jaina philosophy, as we shall see later, has much in common with this.
- ↑ 'The binding of animals (to the sacrificial pole), all the Vêdas, and sacrifices, being causes of sin, cannot save the sinner; for his works (or Karman) are very powerful.' Uttarādhyayana, S.B.E., xlv, p. 140.
- ↑ Sūtrakritāṅga, S.B.E., xlv, p. 294.
- ↑ Ibid., p.366.
- ↑ Uttarādhyayana, S.B.E., xlv, p. 136 ff.
- ↑ 'By one's actions one becomes a Brāhmaṇa or a Kshattriya or a Vaiśya or a Śūdra... him who is exempt from all Karman we call a Brāhmaṇa.' Uttarādhyayana, S.B.E., xlv, p. 140. See also Āċārāṅga Sūtra, S.B.E., xxii, p. 45.