Charlotte Krause her Life and Literature

Author(s): Shreeprakash Pandey
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith

Page 68

The Kaliedoscope of Jaina Wisdom
tsyang's time, in the Ganges valley, and a school of Mahāsānghikas, who believed the Buddha to be all pervading, eternal and omnipotent.
As branches of Mahāyāna, the two schools of the Vijñānavāda or Yogācāra, and that of the Śūnyavāda or Mādhyamikavāda are well-known. The Vijñānavāda declares all the objects and the individual to be illusory and admits only knowledge to possess reality. The Śūnyavāda school, which was founded by Nāgārjuna in the second century B.C., went still further, declaring not only the Knower and the Knowable, but also Knowledge itself to be unreal, and teaching as the last truth the doctrine of the emptiness of the whole world.
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At present, Buddhism is spread over Tibet, Turkistan, Burma, China, Korea, Japan, Thailand and parts of other countries, partly in the form of Mahāyāna, partly in that of Vajrayāna, which later prevails especially in Tibet. But although Buddhism has indeed become one of the great world-religions, it has died out in the country of its birth, Aryan India. Of Indian provinces, only Ceylon, Nepal and Burma have remained centres of Buddhism up to the present day.
It is characteristic that, wherever Buddhism is prevailing today, it has everywhere, adopted the role of a religion, the element of faith and imagination predominating over that of speculation and reasoning, resembling in this development, the Vedic philosophical schools and their derivatives, as far as they have survived.
4. Jainism
That of the Non-vedic systems which is, at present, widest spread in India, is no doubt Jainism, and that in a form in which both the philosophical and the religious moment counterpoise each other.
Like all the other systems, Jainism too, claims eternity. It divides eternity into numberless Utsarpiņīs, i.e., periods of rising development, and Avasarpiņis, i.e., periods of decline, succeeding