Introduction to Jainism and its Culture

Author(s): Balbhadra Jain
Publisher: Kundkund Gyanpith Indore

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become religion. But it is surprising that most of the sects supported evils like meat eating and killing of animals, and widely promoted them in name of religion.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
India is a religious country. Deliberation, contemplation and discussion about the self and the world and their interrelation have always been going on here. Rising above the mundane problems, the sages and philosophers of this country have applied their energies in exploration of the entity called soul and its form. They have put in years of hard meditational practices, pondering and rumination. It was these endeavours that yielded Indian philosophies. Darśana means to perceive or see; to assess a thing perfectly by direct perception. They did not limit their quest to the physical things directly perceivable through sense organs but also included soul that is beyond the reach of the sense organs. It is said that those sages and philosophers directly perceived these fundamentals. They vividly elucidated in words the way they perceived or experienced those fundamentals. The verbal presentation of these thoughts, conceived by these sages as a consequence to the self-realization, is called darśana or philosophy.
It is surprising to find that there is no uniformity in the philosophies of various sages and philosophers. The results of their explorations of the self are not same. Self-realization is unambiguous, vivid as seeing direct, and without any shade of doubt. But these philosophies are mutually contradictory. This indicates that in this context the meaning of philosophy is not self-realization. Some scholars believe that here philosophy means overview or general perception and not self-realization. There is little scope of difference of opinion in an overview. Difference of opinion is in defining or theorizing the results of general perception. This appears to be the reason for the contradictions in these philosophies. This meaning of the word darśana or philosophy (general perception) appears to be evidently correct.
Another opinion about the meaning of the word darśana or philosophy is that each philosopher sage tried to know the form of a thing from his own individual perspective and repeatedly pondered and ruminated over from that angle alone. As a consequence they vividly
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