Jain Journal 1971 01

SR No.: 520021
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publication Year: 1971
Total Pages: 54
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, India_Jain Journal, & India
File Size: 3 MB

Page 15

JANUARY, 1971
inhabited India at the time, in spite of their higher civilisation and culture and intoxicated with all the enjoyments they regaled themselves with on the soil of India, is it normally to be expected, one may ask, for such a people to be thinking of renunciation and asceticism after only a few centuries, not more than five or six, of fully settling down in their new homeland? Very possibly not. We have therefore to look elsewhere for the roots of Jaina and kindred trends of thought. Intermingling of several ways of life and thought gives rise no doubt to exchange of ideas inevitable in co-existence in a common atmosphere, but we are speaking now of probable origins, not of formed or finished results.
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The Aryan tribes on emigrating from their native homeland went to and settled down in many other lands to the east and west besides India, but in none of these are found the ancient traces of ascetical, monastic, pessimistic creeds practising Ahimsā, vegetarianism, mortification of the flesh, an itinerant life, or speculating on the nature and qualities of the individual soul, Atman or Jiva, or on rebirth and Karma, on the lines of the Jainas and other similar sects of ancient India. None of the other mighty cultures also that the yet more ancient world saw, viz., the Egyptians, the Sumerians or the Babylonians etc. produced any such trends which therefore appear to be wholly Indian in origin. When such trends are at all met with in later days in other lands they can mostly be traced to Indian influences transported abroad by various agencies.
We have thus to infer that these trends arose in pre-Aryan India, probably as an off-shoot of the civilisation of the times. It is here most probably that the roots lay of the earliest phases of Indian monastic-ascetical beliefs and practices, of which the oldest representatives in historical times were the Jainas. Modern scholars have pointed out various shades of views as held in Jainism to be reminiscent of primitivism, such as the soul possessing a size co-extensive with the body it inhabits during worldly bondage; the soul being imparted various Lesyas (colours, tastes, smells and feelings) by different kinds of actions, etc. One of the views, no doubt born of considerable reflection and human sympathies, held by these early thinkers was Ahimsa, derived from a belief in the existence of an undying entity or Jiva inhabiting the body, combined with a belief in the inexorable retributive operation of the law of Karma, and its inseperable counterpart, the law of rebirth, all of which being the products of thoughtful and observant minds. Buddha did not believe in the existence of an individual soul, yet he