Jaina Community a Social Survey

SR No.: 007019
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Vilas Sangve
Publisher: Popular Book Depot Bombay
Publication Year: 1980
Total Pages: 484
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 12 MB

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Jaina Community-A Social Survey
never to return, the ascetic order of the community not only fell in number but became very slack in its duties. The ascetics in the later period never showed any enthusiasm in their ordinary activities like preaching and proselytising. There were no intellectual giants, unselfish workers and renowned saints like Bhadrabahu, Kundakunda, Samantabhadra, Akalanka, Haribhadra, JinaHemachandra sena, Umāsvāti, and Siddhasena Diväkara. Naturally they could not, influence the people by their actions. and bring them into the Jaina community. Thus with the lapse of royal support and stoppage of converting people to Jainism due to slackness of its teachers, there was no hope for the Jaina religion to increase the number of its followers.
When the Jaina community was in such a position that it could not augment the number of its members, it was faced with a calamity of severe persecution of its members by the other religionists155 especially Brahmins. Lingayatas or Viraśaivas and Muslims. After gaining the ascendancy the Brahmins reduced the Jainas to the lowest depths of subjection. They threw out the idols in Jaina temples and converted them into Brahmanic ones,156 destroyed the objects of the cult, deprived the Jainas of all freedom, both religious and civil, banished them from public employment and all positions of trust; in fact, they persecuted them to such an extent that they succeeded in removing nearly all traces of these Jainas in several provinces where formerly they had been most flourishing.157 Traces of this old hostility between Jainas and Hindus survive in the Hindu saying that,
हस्तिना ताड्यमानोऽपि न गच्छेज्जैनमंदिरम्
One should not take refuge in a Jaina Temple, even to escape from a mad elephant and in the rule that a Jaina beggar will not take alms from a Hindu unless he can perform some service in 158 The return, though it may not equal the value of the alms.15 position of the Jaina religion in the South was much shaken through persecution. King Sundara of the Pandya dynasty, in the middle of the seventh century, at the instigation of the famous saint Tirujñanasambandara, the arch-enemy of Jainism, persecuted the Jainas with the most savage cruelty and inflicted on no less than eight thousand innocent persons a horrible death by impalement. The memory of this bloody episode is constantly kept alive in the series of frescoes recorded on the wall of the Mantapam of the