Antiquity of Jainism

Author(s): Mahaveer Saran Jain
Publisher: Mahaveer Saran Jain

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of Buddha and therefore it is incorrect to imagine Jainism as the offshoot of Buddhism.
Dr. A. N. Upadhye remarked:
“The origins of Jainism go back to the pre-historic times. They are to be sought in the fertile valley of Ganga, where they flourished in the past, even before the advent of Aryans with their priestly religion, a society of recluses who laid much stress on individual exertion, on practice of a code of morality and devotion to austerities, as means of attaining religious Summum Bonum.”
German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer agreed that there is truth in the Jain idea that their religion goes back to a remote antiquity, the antiquity in question being that of the pre-Aryan, so called Dravidian period, and that Jainism is the oldest of all Dravidian born philosophies and religions.
Noel Retting, another Indologist, writes, "Only in Jainism, of all the living religions, do we see a fusion of the primitive with the profound. It has preserved elements