Historical Facts About Jainism

Author(s): Lala Lajpatrai
Publisher: Jain Associations of India Mumbai

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days, but long before and after this great Scholar, exercised a most powerful and beneficial influence on the civilisation of their Native country. They not only promoted their religion, which taught their countrymen "a pitiful behaviour towards men" and animals, and their Rulers justice towards their subjects, but they promoted learning and literary culture in Sanskrit as well as in Prakrit in Braj Bhasha and in their Vernacular Gujarati. In the same time their laymen caused to be built the splendid temples which adorn the country promoting a fine and impressive plastic and architectural art and to be copied thousands of manuscripts and to be established libraries for their monks. These monks on the whole were not narrow minded as Hemchandra himself studied also the Shastras of other religious communities and hence the spiritual culture. which is abundantly evidenced by the huge mass of the Jain works still existing in our day, was perhaps the highest in all India. What would have become of Prakrit literature without the Jain writers? It is my firm conviction that owing to this very spiritual culture the Jains mantained themselves and their influence in India amongst their people as well as at the Courts of Hindus and Mohamedan Rulers. To the unlearned they gave an attractive literature in the Vernacular, and at the Courts of the Princes they vied in literary art and learning with the most cultured Hinduistic or Mahomedan Scholars and they