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6
as Eastern Aryan countries.1 The language in which the Jainas preached their message was not Sanskrit, but a dialect of Sanskrit in the form of Magadhi Prakrit. The early sacred literature of the Jainas is mostly in Prakrit language evidently a spoken language of the masses in those days. This liberal section of the Aryans evidently adopted this spoken language for the purpose of preaching to the masses their religious doctrine of ahimsā.
A. CHAKRAVARTI:
3
When we come down to the period of the Upanişads we see again the clash between the two different cultures: the sacrificial ritualism of the Kuru Pañcālas and the atmavidya of the Eastern Aryans. The Upanişadic doctrine of atmavidya is associated mainly with kşatriya heroes, and scholars from the Kuru Pāñcāla countries are seen at the courts of these eastern kings,* waiting for the purpose of being initiated into the new wisdom of atmavidya. The Upanisadic world represents a stage at which these two sections were attempting to come to an understanding and compromise.
1 Jaini: Outlines of Jainism (1940), Table opp. p. 6; V. Rangacharya (op. cit., pp. 348-49) holds that Buddhism and Jainism were movements organised by the eastern Ksatriyas.
2 Winternitz: op. cit., Vol. II (1933), p. 427.
3 Winternitz op. cit., Vol. I (1927), pp. 227-32; See Vedic Index, Vol. I, p. 272 wherein it is argued that 'the home of the philosophy of the Upanisads was in the Kuru Pāñcāla country rather than in the east'; but see below, p. 7, note 1.
4 Macdonell: A History of Sanskrit Literature (1925), pp. 213-14.
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