Account of Jainism

Author(s): Unknown
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 99

Jainism.
99
that created light as well as darkness, the heaven as well as the hell. It is a higher notion of Zorostrianism than of the Islamites or the Christians to say that there are two equally original and independent sources of good and evil. This dualism may have its difficulties; but from the moral point of view, to hold that the same being of infinite goodness should have as well been the parent of so much vice and misery is a poorer idea than that of the strugle of Angra Mainyas and Spenta Mainyas, and if pantheism makes moral responsibility impossible, unitarian theology makes evil as necessary as good and thus makes moral conduct absurd. Free from the creation theory, Jainism makes its Gods neither the claimants of credit for our own virtue nor the unrelenting punishers of sins that we are his instruments in committing. The holy teachers of the Jains offer advice but even that is not in the form of commands. They tell universal truths which are their own justification.