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The Jaina as a Jina
RISHABHCHAND
It is common knowledge that the past cannot be recovered any more than it can be annulled. To annul the past is to be rootless, and to try to recover it as it was is a vain attempt, buffeted by time and the forces of evolution. The essence of the past is flowing in the veins of the present, and the best use one can make of it is to nourish it to gr and contribute to the birth of a more glorious future. The chance it gives to create this glorious future is the highest homage that can be paid to the great past.
But the Jainas know that Jainism as practised today is not what it was in the days of Lord Mahavira, and that it was not in the days of Lord Mahavira what it had been in the good old ages. Times change and so does the human mind reorient its focus of attention. History weeds out anachronisms, and life takes care to guard against the inroads of atavism. So to force the present into the mould of the past is to crush the springs of its life and destroy its possibilities. To persist in a mechanical repetition of the old is to court moral and spiritual petrifaction. Man's destiny beckons him to new adventures, unexplored regions and unprecedented conquests. The ramparts of the old crumble down as he launches out to meet the challenge of the future.
There is perhaps no denying the fact that the age of religions has gone by and asceticism had had its day. To make these outlive their utility is to promote hypocrisy and stagnation in society. Old customs and conventions, rites and rituals are fast going by the board, as anyone who opens his eyes can see ; and very few of them are likely to survive for long. And yet man cannot live without religion and without some expressive forms in his active life, which crystallise as customs and rites, and a certain amount of asceticism too is indispensable to spiritual progress. If the old shells of religions have become effete, and the creeds and dogmas corroded by rust and ineffectual in practice, it is futile to lament. Time breathes upon everything formed and finite. A soulless, formalistic religion can be professed only as a veneer or a cloak. To pretend to be its followers is to deceive oneself and spread the infection of doubledealing. But truth is eternal, and the soul of man is immortal. The emergent soul secretes out of itself new principles and new forms of
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