The Heart of Jainism/Chapter 16
The more one studies Jainism, the more one is struck with the pathos of its empty heart. The Jaina beheve strongly in the duty of forgiving others, and yet have no hope of forgiveness from a Higher Power for themselves. They shrink from sin and take vows to guard against it, but know of no dynamic force outside themselves that could enable them to keep those vows. They see before them an austere upward path of righteousness, but know of no Guide to encourage and help them along that difficult way.
A scholar-saint once summed up the Christian faith by saying that the personal friendship of Jesus Christ our Lord was that gift which God became incarnate to bestow on every man who sought it. It is this personal friendship with the Incarnate Son of God which is the great gift that Christianity has to offer to the Jaina. Already, with their power of hero-worship and their intense love of all that is gentle, long-suffering and loving, the Jaina cannot but be attracted to Him. It is perhaps easier for a Jaina than it is for us to appreciate the wonderful portrait of Himself which Christ drew in those rules for happiness which we call the Beatitudes; for, while approving of the Ten Commandments, to which in many respects their own rules bear a strong resemblance, it is to the Beatitudes that they are specially attracted, since these meet their faith at its highest and yet point out a still higher way.
The younger Jaina are worried by the old ascetic ideal that is placed before them. They feel, even when they can hardly express it, that the ideal needed for modern life is the development, not the negation, of personality; they are also increasingly bewildered by the conflict between modern science and their own faith. The appeal of Christianity may come to them through their realizing that the true way to ensure the growth of one's own character is by gaining the noblest of friendships, that of the man Christ Jesus.
But it is when talking to the older men and women that one realizes most how restless and dissatisfied they are at heart, since the ideal their religion offers them is a ritual rather than a personal holiness. A Jaina magistrate once said to the writer: 'I call Jainism a dummy religion. Even if I took bribes and gave false judgements, I should still be considered a holy man, so long as I was careful never to eat after dark.' And an older man made this pathetic confession: 'It is a terrible thing to a Jaina to grow old: we may have tried all our lives to keep our innumerable laws, but we know the awful doom that awaits us if we have broken even one of them, and for us there is no forgiveness.' His pitiful fear seemed wonderfully to enhance the glory of the old Evangel: 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance'; but the man could hardly grasp the fact that, while the Redeemer of the World never uttered one word of hope or forgiveness to strong, self-sufficient, self-righteous folk, He freely offered the riches of His grace to the sinful and fallen, to the weak and helpless, to women and to little children.
A short time ago the writer was talking to a student, who had himself left Jainism, but was explaining to her how many beautiful things there were in the Jaina creed. At length she asked him why he was no longer a Jaina. He turned to her and said: 'Because in all our creed there is no such word as "grace".'
The
problem
of suffering. In a book such as this one can only throw out a few suggestions for a comparison between Jainism and Christianity, and one of the chief points on which they differ is in the value they give to sorrow. To Christian thought sorrow is not necessarily an evil: to the Jaina it is either a calamity to be avoided at all costs, or a punishment from which there is no escape. One can easily understand how Jainism arose: how sensitive souls, finding the pain of the world intolerable, would resolve to free themselves from every tie that might be the means of bringing sorrow upon them, and to give no more hostages to fortune. But they forgot that by shutting themselves off from pain they closed the gates for ever against development, not realizing that, as all advance in knowledge can be gained only at the price of weary drudgery, and even the supreme joy of motherhood is not won without danger and pain, so character can only be completely developed by the discipline of sorrow: the only result of shirking suffering is for scholars, ignorance; for women, barrenness; and for all, even the highest, moral atrophy.
The more one comes to know the Jaina, the more sure one feels that they will not for ever remain satisfied with the thought of a divinity which, by avoiding emotion, has become a characterless being, taking no interest in the lives of his followers and powerless to help them. Already many are attracted by the idea of a God who, becoming incarnate for us men and for our salvation, not only promulgated a law of self-denial and of loving-kindness to every living being more stringent and far-reaching than the Jaina rule, but also Himself suffered in His life and death more loneliness, more insults and more pain than ever Mahāvīra endured, and whose suffering only increased His love and power to help men in their sorrows. Alone amongst the religions of the world the faith of Christ Jesus opens to its followers conquest through pain and mystic joy in sorrow.
Despite the differences between Jainism and Christianity, the resemblance between them is striking. Both religions arose in the East, and both are to this day thoroughly Oriental in their character and spirit. The founders of the two faiths were each the son of a king, and each left his high estate for a life of poverty and insult. Each wandered homeless through sunny lands, followed by a band of twelve disciples, proclaiming the beauty of poverty of spirit, of meekness, of righteousness, of mercy, of purity, of peace, and of patient suffering. Alike they illustrated their teaching from the every-day life of the countryside, showing how much greater a thing it was 'to be' than 'to do', and how perilous 'to have'; but each teacher gave his followers a different motive to rule their lives, for the command of the one was to love and of the other to escape.
No
supreme
God. The Jaina do not believe in one supreme God. Innumerable men of like passions with themselves have, by steadily eradicating all that belongs to personality, passed to take their places amongst the Siddha in a still land of endless inactivity; but none of these are first and none second: all are equal; and none take any interest in the human toilers who are climbing the steep ascent leading to the goal which they themselves have reached.
Forgive-
ness. The loss suffered by those who have relinquished their belief in a supreme God it is impossible adequately to gauge. For instance, the Jaina can have no conception of the forgiveness of sin, for to them there is no God against whom they have sinned, but whose property it is to show mercy, and who, by pardoning past failure, can give an opportunity for future conquest. The Jaina, when they do wrong, only feel that they sin against themselves, injure their own characters, and so lose ground on the upward way, and that such lost progress can only be made up after countless ages of useless (because unremembered) suffering.
Prayer. Again, a system without a God has no room for prayer, for it knows of no almighty and most merciful Father to whose love and wisdom His children can confide their secret desires; and to this day the Jaina count it a sin if a mother, watching beside her suffering child, should appeal to some higher power to save the little life.
Caste. There is no question that the Jaina feel to be more critical than the intricate problem of caste in modern India. The one solvent that can ever weaken the grip of those iron fetters is the thought that, despite all barriers and all differences, we have been created by the same Father and are therefore all children of one family; but a philosophy that denies the Fatherhood of God is able to deny the brotherhood of man; and the notices on their temple gates show that there are no people in India more caste-bound than the Jaina.[1]
Mokṣa. The negation of a personal God affects also the Jaina idea of heaven. The Jaina, as we have seen, think of mokṣa as a bare place of inaction reached by those who through suffering and austerity have completely killed all their individuality and character and have finally snapped the fetters of rebirth. The Christian, like the Jaina, believes in a state whose bliss we shall never leave, but to the Christian heaven is also that sphere where the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, and over which His will has absolute sway. There, in a golden atmosphere of happiness, the redeemed from all nations, with every power disciplined and developed, move without let or hindrance to accomplish the Divine will. There His servants serve Him, for they see His face. It is a land full of joy and singing, from which all sorrow has vanished, not because the character of its citizens has become so stultified that they can no more feel grief, but because the promise has been fulfilled that 'God Himself shall be with them, and be their God: and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more.…He that overcometh [the jina] shall inherit these things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.'[2]
Karma
and
transmi-
gration. Instead of a God delighting in mercy, who rules and judges the fair world that He has made, the Jaina have set in His place a hideous thing, the accumulated energy of past actions, karma, which can no more be affected by love or prayer than a runaway locomotive. On and on it goes, remorselessly dealing out mutilation and suffering, till the energy it has amassed is at last exhausted and a merciful silence follows. The belief in karma and transmigration kills all sympathy and human kindness for sufferers, since any pain a man endures is only the wages he has earned in a previous birth. It is this belief that is responsible amongst other things for the suffering of the thousands of child widows in India, who are taught that they are now reaping the fruit of their unchastity in a former life. There is no conscious justice in this solution, for how can a man possibly accept a sentence as righteous, when he does not even know for what he is being tried and has no recollection of ever committing the crime?
Ahiṁsā. Much, however, as the Jaina find to admire in Christianity, one of their tenets, that of Ahiṁsā, casts for them a great shadow across the Christian faith: they feel that the followers of Christ are stained with the sin of animal murder, and until this feeling is removed, they will never really understand the beauty of our religion.
One would like to remind them first of the quite elementary fact that a great many Christians are actually vegetarians, and that no Christian is under any obligation to eat meat; in fact the great missionary apostle expressly said, 'If meat maketh my brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh for evermore'.[3] Not as though there were any sin in eating or in not eating meat. Jesus Christ, realizing that there were enough real sins already in the world, created no artificial ones by laying down ritual regulations for His followers to govern the details of their daily lives. But though He gave them no narrow code of rules, as though they had been slaves, He did lay down for them certain great principles on which they might fashion their lives in absolute freedom, and one of these was the principle of self-sacrificing service.
Science has taught us that the physical world is governed by the law of sacrifice: that all existence is maintained through the death of others, and that every living organism is built up through the silent and invisible work of the minute bacteria of decay, which release from the dead the material needed by the living. It is this same law of sacrifice, of life through another's death, which governs also the spiritual world. When animals and insects are killed that a Jaina may have light to study, material for clothing, shoes to wear, bread to eat, water with which to wash, or air to breathe, it seems to him that the sin of murder has been committed (for the Jaina have not yet learnt clearly to distinguish between human and animal life); but to the Christian it seems that he has accepted strength from others, which he is therefore bound to expend in service. And this is the reason that at every meal he thanks God for the food given and asks that the strength gained may be used in God's service.[4] For the follower of Christ has realized that his very entrance into the world was purchased by another's pain (perhaps death), and that throughout life his food, his clothing, and even his leisure for study or for art is earned by the toil of others. He cannot therefore count himself his own, but as a 'debtor' he is bound to use his life and his leisure in the service of others, that they in their turn may by his work be helped to labour more happily.
Following this thought, we seem to catch a glimpse of what is perhaps one great purpose of God, that all His creatures should be linked to one another by golden chains of self-sacrificing service. In the highest realm of all the same law still holds: 'Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. ... He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.'[5]
But the golden chain that binds us all into one loving whole is broken by cruelty, and it is here that the Jaina fail. Their belief in the duty of not killing is not in practice complemented by an equal fear of cruelty. It is surely happier for instance, for an animal to be well tended, well fed, and well cared for, and then to die swiftly and painlessly before old age and suffering come upon it, than to linger on, as one so often sees in India (even in a Jaina asylum for animals[6]), neglected, suffering, and even starving, once it has passed its prime.
Moreover, the logical outcome of the doctrine of Ahiṁsā is, as the Jaina themselves admit, a reductio ad absurdum. They must not move for fear of treading on and killing some minute insect; for the same reason they must not eat and they must not breathe. So that in order not to commit hiṁsā Jaina sometimes commit suicide, yet suicide they consider one of the wickedest of crimes.[7] It is scientifically impossible to take as a life's motto Ahiṁsā parama dharma, since it is contrary to the order of nature. To carry it out, a man ought not to be born, lest his birth should cost his mother her life; he must not continue to live when he is born, since every instant he breathes he takes life; he must not commit suicide, for that is taking life; he must not even die a natural death, for in the burning of his corpse after death some life would be destroyed.
But though our Lord gave to His followers the law of self-sacrificing service, not that of Ahiṁsā, He was nevertheless careful to teach them how exceedingly precious in the sight of the Creator was the life of even the smallest of His creatures. 'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?' said Christ, 'and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.'[8] And again in His great Sermon on the Mount: 'Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them.'[9]
And so through all the history of Christendom it has been proved true that
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.'
System of
ethics. Another great difference between Christianity and Jainism lies in the fact that, while Jainism may fairly be regarded as a system of ethics rather than a religion, yet the intensely self-centred point of view of Jainism, in which all actions are judged by the profit (puṇya) that may accrue from them, differentiates it also from altruistic ethical systems; and this self-centred attitude, perhaps, it is which largely accounts for the failure of the Jaina as a whole to take their share in social reform.
Person-
ality and
life. The supreme difference, however, between Jainism and Christianity we have already glanced at more than once; it lies in their treatment of personality and life. The object of Christianity is to educate every sense and to train the whole personality, till the highest development is reached, and we all attain 'unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ'.[10] The key-word of Jainism, on the other hand, is the elimination of personality. So long as a man has to live in this world, he should daily curtail his opportunities of development; and if he attains to the ascetic life, he should see to it that his personality withers the faster, for atrophy is his goal.
It will be remembered that before Mahāvīra's death nine out of his twelve disciples carried their Master's precepts to their logical conclusion and gained the goal of death through religious suicide by starvation; and we have seen how, through the long centuries right down to the present time, this has been the practice of his most devoted followers. What could be a greater contrast than the lives of the twelve men who followed Christ, and whose work after His death and resurrection turned the dead old world upside down; for the Master they served was one who had come to give Life, and to give it more abundantly.
The un-
known
God of
Jainism. There is a strange mystery in Jainism; for though it acknowledges no personal God, knowing Him neither as Creator, Father, or Friend, yet it will never allow itself to be called an atheistic system. Indeed there is no more deadly insult that one could level at a Jaina than to call him a nāstika or atheist.
It is as if, though their king were yet unknown to them, they were nevertheless all unconsciously awaiting his advent amongst them, and proudly called themselves royalists.
The marks which they will ask to see in one who claims to be their king will be the proofs of Incarnation (avatāra), of Suffering (tapa), and of the Majesty of a Conqueror (Jina). But when once they recognize Him, they will pour out at His feet all the wealth of their trained powers of self-denial and renunciation. Then shall He, the Desire of all nations, whose right it is to reign, take His seat on the empty throne of their hearts, and He shall reign King of Kings and Lord of Lords for ever and ever.
- ↑ The notice on Haṭṭhisimha's temple in Aḥmadābād runs: 'Low-caste servants in attendance on visitors and dogs cannot be allowed to enter the temple.'
- ↑ Rev. xxi. 3–4; 7.
- ↑ 1 Cor. viii. 13.
- ↑ Compare the old College grace: 'Benignissime Domine, benedic nobis et hisce creaturis in usum nostrum; ut illae sanctificatae sint et nobis salutares, et nos inde corroborati magis apti reddamur ad omnia opera bona, in laudem tui nominis aeternam per Iesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.'
- ↑ Isaiah liii. 4-6.
- ↑ These asylums or Pāñjarāpoḷa are peculiar to Jainism, and all sects of the Jaina unite in striving to acquire merit by supporting them. They are to be found in many of the large towns and villages throughout India, and house decrepit and suffering cattle, horses, donkeys, goats, &c.; even pāriah dogs are collected in special dog-carts (i.e. wheeled cages) by men armed with long iron pincers with which they can safely pick up the most savage and filthy curs. But, as far as any real kindness to animals is concerned, these institutions in their actual working leave much to be desired, however meritorious the intention of their founders may have been.
- ↑ The whole Jaina position in relation to suicide is, however, most puzzling. Apparently simple suicide is held to be a crime, but santhāro, or religious suicide, is a meritorious act.
- ↑ St. Matt. x. 29.
- ↑ St. Matt. vi. 26.
- ↑ Eph. iv. 13.