Heart of Jainism

Author(s): Mrs Sinclair Stevenson
Publisher: Mrs Sinclair Stevenson

Page 19

INTRODUCTION
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among the indigenous inhabitants of Bengal, which includes Bihār, where the religion had its origin, and Orissa, where the caves of Udayagiri and Khandagiri bear witness to its popularity in the early centuries of our era '.1 While to the north in Mathurā, Delhi, Jaipur, and Ajmer, it is still fairly well represented, the chief seats of Jaina influence in modern times are the cities and trading marts of Western India. The mercantile communities of Gujarăt and Mārwār owe not a little of their prosperity to Jaina enterprise, and the Order is said to be largely recruited from the cultivators in the Carnatic district of Belgaum. To trace through the centuries this westward trend of Jainism and to investigate its causes were surely a subject worthy of engaging the attention of students of the Indian religions.
Again, in its origin, Jainism was a protest on the part of the Kşatriyas, or warrior caste, against the exclusiveness of priests who desired to limit entry into the mendicant stage (Sannyāsin Aśrama) to persons of the Brahman caste alone. As Professor Hopkins graphically puts it, The Kings of the East were impatient of the Western Church : they were pleased to throw it over. The leaders in the "reformation" were the younger sons of noble blood ... they were princes and had royalty to back them.'2 But time brings its revenges, and this Jaina religion, cradled in the aristocracy of a military caste, was destined to become the chief exponent of a grotesque exaggeration of the principle of ahiinsā, or 'non-injury' to any living being. The explanation of a change so radical cannot but prove of the deepest interest.
Yet once again Jainism, with its explicit belief in a plurality of eternal spirits, every material entity having its own individual spirit, jīvātmā, no less expressly disbelieves in the Supreme Spirit, the Paramātmā. Jainism is definitely atheistic, if by atheism we mean the denial of
1 Imperial Gazetteer of India (New Edition), i. 417. 2 E. W. Hopkins, op. cit., p. 282.