Epitome of Jainism

Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 71

INTRODUCTION women cannot attain to salvation ; and they are so strongly biassed in this that they take even the Virgin lady Malli Kumari, the 19th Tirthankar, not as a female but a male. But the Shvetâmbars hold that both men and women are alike entitled to and can actually attain to nirvana.
Jainism is not a monastic religion but truly an evangelic or a missionary religion, -religion intended not for the ascetics only ( male and female ) but for the world at large in which the majority are lay people. Some remark that Jainism lacked in that missionary spirit which gave life and scope to early Buddhism. But this view is not based on right observation of facts and correct interpretation of the Jain religious thought and culture. For in the Jain canonical rules for the ascetics, it is distinctly enjoined that a monk, excepting the Chaturmäsya, or the period of four months during the rainy season, should generally on no account stay at a fixed place for more than one month ; rather he should go on wandering from city to city, from village to village, preaching the cardinal truths of his