Jaina Philosophy

SR No.: 006901
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Virchand R Gandhi, Kumarpal Desai
Publisher: World Jain Confederation
Publication Year: 2009
Total Pages: 298
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 5 MB

Page 104

eaceancaran
Have Christian Missions to India Been Successful ?
of Hindu virtues which impressed the foreigners who came into contact with them before Christian civilization reached us, but time will not permit me to do so. My main purpose is to show to you that the presence and predominating influence of foreigners, Scythians, Mongolians, Mohammedans or Christians has been to deteriorate India. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars except Christian Missionaries.
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we hear in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that-corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life alone, but a transfigured and eternal life-again I should point to India."
"Before India, became the hunting-ground of foreign marauders, she had produced poets and philosophers at whose feet Homer or Plato, Shakespeare or Bacon would have done well to sit and learn. But when these barbarians overran Aryavarta and made it into Hindustan; when Mahomed of Ghuzni the great iconoclast made it his business to trample everything that was dear and sacred to the Aryan mind; when Zenghiskhan and his successors with the exception of one or two spread their tyranny over the country and lastly when the European Commerce and Western Civilization began to suck the very blood of India, would you wonder that India is not in the same condition as it was in days gone by.