Atmanandji Jainacharya Janmashatabdi Smarakgranth

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Atmanand Janma Shatabdi Smarak Trust

Page 92

THE CAILD
PROMISE
( Mrs. Rhys Davids D. Litt M. A.)
My message is not for the Jainonly; it is for the child of India.
Many centuries ago India gave to herself and thereby to the world a mandate of the first importance. It was about the man, the individual man or human being. It was about the worth or value of man as man. In Christendom the man's highest worth is declared to be sonship of the Highest by adoption. India's nandate, at a much earlier date, had declared that worth to be conship by nature. It is his birthright. It is a direct lineage, rot an indirect descent. Man was not declared to be of divine nature as one God among many Gods; he was declared to be in nature as one with supreme Deity. Herein India worded in her own way. The teacher, as we know, said: That art thou ! The 'thou' is here enphasized, else had the verb alone been sufficient : Tam asi ! The point in the mantra is in what is said not about Tam, but about the man. We are wrong if we render it by Thou art That !' The That' needed no emphasis; the emphasis was needed by the man.
This emphasis, this needed emphasis was a New Word. It told of a new uplift in mau's idea of man. But at the same time it was, If lightly, if carelessly used, an intensely irrational saying. Much more so than if one were to tell a little child: 'You are a woman like mother; you are a man like father.' We say, it is true, proverbially: 'The child is father of the man,' We mean of course, that the promise and potency in the infant will in his growth become or develop into a certain sort of man. We are considering the child with an eye to the More that we believe he has in him to become. Thus understood, the proverbial saying is not irrational.
So also should we consider India's mantia, Her teachers had been considering this and that aspect of things and of the man, one and all, under the notion of becoming' rather than 'being'. We have but to read the older Upanisads ( in the original, not in the translations ) to see that this is true. This being so, there will ever have been, in the meaning and force of the verb as, asi, the background, deeper in meaning and in force, of the verb bhu, bhavasi. And
Shatabdi Granth ]
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