Lord Mahavira Vol 02

SR No.: 023277
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: S C Rampuria
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati Institute
Publication Year: 2001
Total Pages: 244
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 21 MB

Page 135

126
Lord Mahavira I would add again, if it be said, that had the Founders felt that reform was needed in just that accepted cult of Immance, they would have made this clear as they do not in their recorded teaching I would answer: the man who is charged with, inspired by a mandate of help for his neighbours, may, or may not, have discerned just how that mandate applies to the prevalent cult of his country and age. He is too near; he cannot see the application of it in perspective as we can. Or, if he did see it, the religious values of his own aftermen will have greatly changed by the time of his own sayings and those of his helpers came to reach the form in which we read them today. In the days of those after man a new polytheism, had sprung up in northern India, in India generally; and even if the Founder had pointed out wherein he found the cult of his day faulty, it is only too likely that latter editors will have failed to keep alive the original point of his teaching.
And now to come to the Man himself 'For those who know nothing of the subject it is best to remind them that Mahâvîra (great hero) was not the personal or family name of Founder of Jainism. This was Vardhamana, word meaning not merely increasing, multiplying (the meaning given in Jain exegesis), but also growing becoming it was a name by no means unique in India then or now.
"Now I was he who first worded a departure from acquiescence in the worth of Imanence as then taught in India by the preponderant Brahmana teaching. Brahmanas were reaching the mandate first by a forgotten seer of the preceding age, perhaps
o centuries earlier. This was, that in very essence is divine, and as being such would one day attain full Godhead. This was taught as in a way true of man even here and now. It was here in a dangerous teaching, for it treated future as present: it told man he was, even now as God: "That art thou:' It was here in a lie in but the basis. It passed over the fact of man's very imperfect child like state. It valued him in the present as he can only become in the future, when he could be said to be 'grown up'. .
I saw manas in a More, and in that only. I saw teachers holding in worth the unfit as the fit, the unhonoured as the honoured, the man as he may be not different from the manas he was as yet, even in the best.