Heart of Jainism

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

Page 34

INTRODUCTORY
The fact of being debarred from entering the ascetic life through the recognized stages and of being treated as in every way inferior was naturally most keenly felt by those in the caste next below the Brāhmans, the clever, critical Kşatriya, and it is from the ranks of these that the Jaina as well as the Buddhist reformers sprang.
Sacrifice was another occasion of quarrelling between the two castes. The Ksatriya claimed that in old days they had been allowed to take part with the Brāhmans in the sacrifices from which they were now shut out; but the whole feeling about sacrifice was altering. As the Aryan invaders settled down in India, they grafted on to their original faith much from the darker creeds belonging to the lands and people they conquered, and gradually lost the child-like joy of the earlier Vedic times. The faith of the woodland peoples inspired them with the idea that all things—animals, insects, leaves and clods—were possessed of souls; and this, together with the growing weight of their belief in transmigration, gave them a shrinking horror of taking life in any form, whether in sacrifice? or sport, lest the blood of the slain should chain them still more firmly to the wheel of rebirth. So they came to dislike both the creed and the pretensions of their own priests, and the times were indeed ripe for revolt.
The Brāhmans declared that their supremacy and their sacrifices were based on the Vedas, so the authority of the Vedas was denied by the new thinkers. The Brāhmans claimed that the four castes had been created from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the Creator, thus ensuring the supremacy of that caste which had issued from the
1 It seems probable that the atheistic (anti-Brāhmanic) system of philosophy-the Sankhya-also arose amongst the Ksatriya. Jaina philosophy, as we shall see later, has much in common with this.
2 'The binding of animals (to the sacrificial pole), all the Vedas, and sacrifices, being causes of sin, cannot save the sinner; for his works (or Karman) are very powerful.' Uttaradhyayana, S.B.E., xlv, p. 140.