Gaina sutras

Author(s): Hermann Jacobi
Publisher: Clarendon Perss

Page 17

INTRODUCTION.
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their terminology were opponents of the Gainas, but not vice versâ.
Lassen, as a second argument in favour of the priority of Buddhism, adduces the fact that both sects worship mortal men, their prophets, like gods, and erect statues of them in their temples. As Buddhism and Gainism excepted none of the many sects, the founders of which pretended, like Buddha or Mahâvîra, to omniscience and absolute perfection, have continued long enough to come within the reach of our knowledge-and all or many of them may, for aught we know, have given the same divine honours to their saints, as the Buddhists and Gainas did to their own prophets-it cannot be alleged that the practice of the Buddhists rather than of any other sect was imitated by the Gainas, or vice versâ. On the contrary, there is nothing in the notion of Buddha that could have favoured the erecting of statues and temples for his followers to worship them, but rather much that is inconsistent with this kind of adoration, while the Gainas commit no inconsistency in worshipping Mahavira in his apotheosis. But I believe that this worship had nothing to do with original Buddhism or Gainism, that it did not originate with the monks, but with the lay community, when the people in general felt the want of a higher cult than that of their rude deities and demons, and when the religious development of India found in the Bhakti the supreme means of salvation. Therefore instead of seeing in the Buddhists the originals, and in the Gainas the imitators, with regard to the erection of temples and worship of statues, we assume that both sects were, independently from each other, brought to adopt this practice by the perpetual and irresistible influence of the religious development of the people in India.
The third point of resemblance between both sects, the stress which is laid on the ahimsâ or not killing of living beings, will be treated more fully in the sequel. For this reason I quickly pass over to Professor Lassen's fourth argument, viz. that the Buddhists and Gainas measure the history of the world by those enormous periods of time which bewilder and awe even the most imaginative fancy.