Aspect of Jainology Part 2 Pandita Bechardas Doshi

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Sagarmal Jain
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith

Page 422

Jaina Religion-Its Plea, Practice and Prospects
mind and heart now tending to become large and liberal. Knowledge, power and bliss have now become the birthright of man. It is a sheer delusion (stemming from ignorance) that only a religion of a particular nation or a country is valid to the exclusion of others. To accelerate the speed of a man's progress and to make the external unity stable and sound, religious outlook shall have to be catholic, comprehensive, and right. Emphasis shall have to be shifted from routine ritualism to the purifying programme of the mind. To achieve this aim the will have to be steel.
It is a belief voiced by several and shared by some that the religions are on their way to extinction as they have served so far no really useful. But this belief has no real basis as can be seen from what the philosophers and scientists in the West have for some time been saying. Day in and day out various serious publications are seen in the market that testify to the fact that the distance between religion, pure philosophy, and science is daily diminishing as indeed it logically must.
The majority of writers in the West are now unanimous in proclaiming that man is the architect of his own fortune, that he himself has independently to work out his own redemption, that there is rebirth, that there is something which is sentient, conscious and distinct from the physical body which by itself is insentient and that there is an inviolable moral law which is supreme. The concept of the future religion will be vastly broader, accomodating as it will the knowledge of all kinds inside it as also a central ideal and guiding philosophy that all activities of times and climes from part of, and contribute to, the furtherance of the universal religion". The final goal of life of each and every human being should be to achieve the ultimate goal of life here or anywhere and now or in any time. There is no other option.
Universal religion, as Wood indicates, can be one only, and Jainism has qualifications and intrinsic potential to play a significant role in its formulation. Therefore, it follows that we must be even-minded towards all the promulgators of the religious systems and to the sacred writings of all religions. However, tolerance alone is barely suffiicient. At best it is a passive if not totally negative an approach. On the contrary, we must adopt what is best in all of them and assimilate it in life so that it becomes our very way of life. Practice, and not profession, should be our aim, What Haribhadra süri had said is valid for all times. He had said to the effect that he possesses no partiality for either Vira or Kapila. He will accept and absorb everything from any religion whatsover, that stands to reason. Dogmatism deserves dismissal. Faith is one thing; fundamentalism is another.