Jain Journal 1971 10

SR No.: 520024
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publication Year: 1971
Total Pages: 45
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, India_Jain Journal, & India
File Size: 3 MB

Page 5

JAIN JOURNAL
eager to put an end to all their glidings to and fro, through the various existences, which were a veritable wilderness. It was this that provided the basis of the Jaina view of the universe, which was not basically very different from a contemporaneous Hindu view of it, with a similar end. With the goal thus set, the Jaina savants indulged into what would appear to us conjectures and speculations about the universe based on their spiritual insight. “Scientific reasoning' was not developed at this period as also material apparatuses and therefore one would look in vain for the use of these in the production of canonical literature. The coverage too was too wide, the whole universe, of which only a microscopic fraction has been revealed to the modern sciences. It is therefore impossible to adjudge how far scientific, or how far from it, is or has been the Jaina, or, in fact, any other traditional, view on the subject but this much mus be admitted that for the presentation of their findings, the Jainas, like their other counterparts, had developed an adequate methodology and an admirable terminology, which one is free to accept or reject.
Thus conceived, science became a part of religion, or religion became a part of science, and the two got so much mixed up in India that it was impossible to extricate one from the other. And there was nothing to fear from this admixture, since religion in India was a matter of realisation, not merely a blind faith in the words of the mouth and sacred texts, which each and every person was free to perceive and ultimately achieve. It was never fixed to certain dogmas, but to practices, it was not mere ritualistic but realisation-based that gave religion a built-in strength, and that perhaps is the reason why it has survived in this country the onslaughts of time and impacts of faith-oriented religions that later came to this land. This has not been so in the west where science and religion had remained poles apart, in hostile camps, and this for all times, since, even now, we have it on the authority of scholars like Arnold Toynbee and others, there is no compromise between the two. As things stand in the west, modern science was born around the 12th century A.D., on the basis of inspiration it received from the Greek philosophers who had lived about 2000 years earlier, and who had provided ʻreasoning', and it was quest for truth which was enshrouded in, and discouraged by, the teachings of a dominant church which provided the immediate impetus. So science started in the west by breaking away from the church teachings and since, in the ensuing battle, science proved the stronger of the two, it dominates the western life today more than the church, but unlike in India, western science, whatever its cause of genesis, is now almost wholly put to a material end, thereby removing any plausible basis for comparison between modern science of the west and traditional knowledge of the east. To this extent, comparative