Historical Facts About Jainism

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

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original tenets of their faith so represented, not seldom with evident bias, by their rivals the Buddhists.
It is now certain that the Jain community was really even older than the time of the Buddha, and was re-organised by his contemporary the Mahavira, named Vaddhamana. And it is also clear that the Jain views of life were, in the most important and essential respects, the exact reverse of the Buddhist views. The two orders, Buddhist and Jain, were not only, and from the first, independent but directly opposed the one to the other. In philosophy the Jains are the most thorough going supporters of the old Animistic position. Nearly everything, according to them, has a soul within its outward visible shape-not only men and animals, but also all plants, and even particles of earth, and of water (when it is cool), and fire and wind. The Buddhist theory, as is well-known, is put together without the hypothesis of "soul" at all.
The word the Jains use for soul is Jiva, which ineans life; and there is much analogy between many of the expressions they use and the view that the ultimate cells and atoms are all, in a more or less modified sense, alive. They regard good, and evil, and space as ultimate substances which come into direct contact with the minute souls in everything. And their best known position in regard to the points most discussed in philosophy is Syad-Vada.-RHYS-DAVIDS,