History of Jaina Monachism

Author(s): S B Deo
Publisher: Deccan College Research Institute

Page 59

S. B. DEO
Comparatively later works like the Dharmasútras, 48 and Epics49 and the Arthaśästra50 distinctly reveal views against sannyāsa.
Taking into consideration, therefore, the facts that the aśrama theory was perhaps still in the making in the period of the older Upanishads, that the stages in it were possibly not followed in a definite sequence, and that the sannyāsa āśrama was not looked at with favour in some of the Brāhmanical texts, we cannot say whether Jaina and Buddhist monachisms originated out of it, and CHARPENTIER even doubts whether "the theory was ever on a great scale adopted in real life in India."51
7. "Magadhan Religion : Indigenous Stream of Thought":
A view somewhat opposite to the previous one is advocated by scholars like OLDENBERG, DUTT and UPADHYE. The gist of their theory is that śramanism seems to have developed out of the non-Aryan east Indian indigenous element which did not see eye to eye with the Western Aryans who were not very favourable to monastic life.
UPADHYE says, "Before the advent of the Aryans in India, we can legitimately imagine that a highly cultivated society existed along the fertile banks of the Ganges and Jumna, and it had its religious teachers. Vedic texts have always looked with some antipathy at the Magadhan country where Jainism and Buddhism flourished; and these religions owe no allegiance to the Vedic authorities. The gap in the philosophical thought at the close of the Brāhmaṇa period has necessitated the postulation of an indigenous stream of thought which must have influenced the Aryan thought, at the same time being influenced by the latter ......I have called this stream of thought by the name "Magadhan religion."... We should no more assess the Sāmkhya, Jaina, Buddhistic and Ajīvika tenets as mere perverted continuations of stray thoughts selected at random from the Upanishadic bed of Aryan thought current. The inherent similarities in these systems, as against the essential dissimilarities with Aryan (Vedic and Brahmanic) religion and the gaps that a dispassionate study might detect between the Vedic (including the Brāhmanas) and Upanishadic thought-currents, really point out to the existence of an indigenous stream of thought". 52
48. Apastambha: II, 9, 9.; Baudhāyana: II, 6, 29. 49. MBh., Utterance of Bhima in XII, 10. 20.
50. Punishment for those who renounce the world without providing for their wives and sons in Arthaśāśtra, II, 1 (p. 48 of Shāma SHASTRI's ed. Mysore, 1909).
51. Op. cit., p. 151. 52. Brhatkathākośa, Intr. p. 12; also Pravacanasāra, Pref. pp. 12-13.