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Heroes of the Jain Legends
this way.
Pandavas and numerous other personages Brahmañic literature is to be explained in The denunciation of Rävaña and his Rakshasa hordes with equal emphasis by the Jaina and the Brahmañic sacred books can be explained in no other way. The description of Rama as an ideal man, which we meet with in the Brahmanic, the Jaina and the Buddhist literatures, points to the same thing. Had Jainism been a positive and distinctive religion, existing in antagonism with the Brahmanic cult in the days of Rama, we could not have expected to have Rama, who is described as a Jaina in the Jaina Purana, accep ted as the best of mortals by the Brahmañic literature; in other words, if Valmiki be held to have been actuated in any way by a spirit of religious hatred against Jainism, we would have found him denoun. cing Rama in the same way as he did the Rakshasas. The fact is that distinctive religions did not exist in India before the 6th and the 7th centuries B. C. and religious spite and bigatry cannot be attributed to Valmiki and other writers of his age.
No. 1]
Bhagiratha, Krishna, the in both the Jaina and the
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In this connection, we may be permitted to make a short digression and say that even at a later time when Brahminism, Buddhism and Jainism began to flourish as rival faiths,-sword was very seldom resorted to by any of them to establish its supremacy. We are no doubt told that king Sasanka of Karna-Suvarna cut off the Bodhi-tree. We are also treated with the story that the celebrated Sankaracharyya was thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil by the Buddhist high priest. In the inscriptions of Asōka, we get references to his discrediting the Brahmanas. Stories of religious persecutions are no doubt met with in the literature of rival faiths. We do not deny that at times and at places, there were strong feelings against a particular faith; there might have been local and temporary persecutions. But we believe, the stories of persecutions which we meet with in the religious literature of India, are mostly exaggerated. Generally speaking, there was no serious quarrel among the three faiths in India. Ethics and moral practices were the same among them. The theory of Karma and the faith in re-incarnation were common. The gods, Indra etc., were admitted by all of them and the social structure also was very probably not seriously interfered with by any of the so-called protestant faiths. Under the circums
