Doctrine of Karman in Jain Philosophy

Author(s): Hiralal R Kapadia
Publisher: Vijibai Jivanlal Panalal Charity Fund Mumbai

Page 14

FOREWORD
a definiteness in statement, which would do credit to the most methodical modern system, yet here again the question about its age remains, for the time being, an open one. At least one thousand years before the Christian era the Karman tenet is said to have been in vogue. This is of course supposed to be the lower limit, the higher one possibly lying much further back in antiquity. But the fact is significant that it cannot be shown where precisely and when a doctrine of such central position as that of the Karman originated. That the fundamental idea of Karman is part and parcel of the Jain canon may be as readily accepted as the assumption that later writers have developed the theory in detail and expressed in technical terms what the elders implicitly had taught and believed. But if neither Jainism, nor Buddhism, nor Hinduism has got to show a definite date of origin for a doctrine that with all of them is a pivot of their beliefs, might it not be assumed that this doctrine of the Karman in its various shades is an inheritance of old, a technical expression of the universally acknowledged law of moral retribution ?
The third point that strikes the modern student of religion is the great insight attached to authority. In this Jainism indeed does not stand alone. The Vedic Rși of yore, the Tathāgata with the Bud. dhists, claimed and enjoyed as undisputed an authority in deciding the most momentous problems as the Jain Kevalin. But that they all were credited with such insight into things beyond the senses and primitive thinking as would command unswerving faith, and would cut short questions like Why ? and How ?: this is a document of the fact that even atheistic religious systems, to say nothing of strict Theism, profess to be a higher message, and claim to convey a preternatural, if not a supernatural truth.
So much about the book before us and its contents. One more word about the author. In the Preface to the English Edition (p. 21) he makes mention of "the difficulty which besets a European in penetrating into an intricate Indian philosophical system”. It is true, in undertaking and accomplishing such a task everything is against him, except the will to know and to get over every obstacle. The Indian can hardly realise how a day's, perhaps a week's, work may be lying behind the grasp of a term the understanding of which is a matter of tradition to him. Considering what Dr. von Glasenapp has achieved, it may not be easy to say who is to be congratulated more, whether he who has mastered so successfully the task before him, or the readers, the members of the Jain community before all, who thus easily enter into the fruits of the author's labour. The Encyclopædia for IndoAryan Research (I. Band, I. Heft B, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und Indischen Altertumskunde, von Ernst Windisch, p. 354),