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Lord Mahavira and His Teachings
61
What determines the voluntary incarnation of such divine men as Mahavira and his illustrious predecessors—the twenty-three earlier Tirthankaras, the first of whom, Rishabhadeva, was the founder of the Jaina School of Philosophical discipline? This doctrine of a line of Divine Incarnations is to be met not only in Jainism; in other Traditions like that of "the Buddhas who have been and will be" or that referred to in the fourth chapter of The Bhagavad Gita we come upon the same teaching. It is a reasonable and convincing truth in the light of the teaching about cycles, yugas, manvantaras, and kalpas; the Greeks also had their kuklos, the Cycle of Necessity.
Now, is it not strange that the cycle which drew Mahavira to earth was also adorned by other Great Teachers-the Gautama Buddha in India, Lao-tse and Confucius in China, the last of the Zoroasters in Iran, Pythagoras in Greece, and others? The fifth and sixth centuries B.C. seem to be a very special period marked by the motion of the Chakra, the Wheel of Progress, of the ups and downs of the ever-lengthening spiral of evolution.
Can we find a definite underlying purpose of the cycle as it affected human history? It seems to us that the Age opened a new chapter, a new dispensation for those human souls who were becoming ready to tread the path of Harmlessness, of the Tenderness, of the Inner Light
Great . Divine Men come yuge-yuge, cycle after cycle, to educate the mind of the race, to emancipate its heart from the thraldom of cruelty born of hatred,
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