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• MAHAVIRA AND HIS PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE1
The quest for the Higher on an intellectual or metaphysical plane has been all along, in India, the privilege or province of some outstanding individual or individuals, while the mass of the population, generally steeped in ignorance and poverty, was de voted to crude deification and ancestor-worship. The power of a religious leader lay in his ability to win over to his creed the people around him. In India there have been two types of religious leaders: the Priest, and the Ascetic.
The priest was a champion of ritualism. He "vigorously claimed that the welfare and indeed the very existence of the world, including even the gods, depended upon the maintenance of their systems of sacrifice, which grew to immense size and complexity." The cults popularised by him were polytheistic; the deities were very often forces of nature; and man was put at their utter mercy, the priest along being capable of saving him by seeking the favour of the deities through sacrificial rites. This is the line of thought of the Vedic religion and its custodians. It
1 This lecture on "MAHAVIRA AND HIS PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE" was delivered by Dr. A. N. Upadhye, M.A., D.Litt., Head of the Department of Ardhamagadhi in Rajaram College, Kolhapur, on the occasion of Mahavira Jayanti on 23rd April, 1956. The meeting was sponsored jointly by the Indian Institute of Culture and the Jains Mission Society, Bangalore.
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