Idea of Ahimsa and Asceticism in Ancient Indian Tradition

Author(s): Bansidhar Bhatt
Publisher: B J Institute

Page 64

REFORM RELIGIONS ....
55
Ma gadhi as mass media had not acquired a status of the language of the gods, the deva-bhasa - Sanskrit - which was privileged and reserved for the sacred dharma as a whole. The early phases of the canonical texts of the reforms religions have nothing to say against the Brahmanical thinking?. But the separative tendency often peeps through successive phases of these texts. Researches particularly in this direction would certainly offer some exciting results.
The separation of the two religions from the Brahmanism was at the full in deification of their leaders, Gotama, the Buddha and Vardhamana, the Maha vira, and ultimately after about the 1st century of our era, their teachings spread over with anta gonism, and the orthodoxy drifted far away from Brahmanism. Now Jainas and the Buddhists claim their faiths to be nonVedic or non-Aryan. The term: non-Vedic means: "not believ. ing in the Vedic authority", and this is somewhat understandable. But going still further and employing the terms like nonAryan and pre-Aryan or pre-Vedic for their religions carries no sense. What is non-Aryan or pre-Vedic ? Their views or they themselves ? Both terms are doubtful, vague and not understandable. None of these terms is applicable to the reform religions except both religions are absolutely excluded and dissociated from the Vedic culture since the Indo-Aryan people arrived in India and since the so-called pre-Vedic concepts originated and merged in reform religions. Use of such terms is absurd and ridiculous.
Statements regarding ascetic movements - the so-called sramanism supposed to have come from the Indus Culture, and devel only in reform religions, lack sufficient evidences. Whether the Indus Culture flourished in the north-west, expanded further approximately more than 3000 kilometers away till the extreme eastern regions of India, and covering some parts where the reform religions were originated, and how it left any of its surviving tracks directly and only on these religions this all is difficult to prove. Again, eastern parts of ancient India contained many pockets of tribal peoples like Mundas, Santhals, etc., and even before the existence of Jainism and Buddhism, the Aryan culture had reached this area to a considerable degree, and remained a centre of some upanişadic thinkers. Whether
2. For such matters in detail, see Bhatt-2. especially p.166; and D.D.
Malvania: "Beginnings of Jaina Philosophy in the Add ranga."
(ANIS. 23, Wilesbadeb 1981, pp.151-153).