Jain Journal 1973 07

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 31

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JAIN JOURNAL
of displeasure (ha-kār), prohibition (ma-kār) and rebuke (dhik-kār) to anybody committing offence were more than death to him. Man is not wholly good nor wholly bad by nature. There are the elements of both goodness and badness in him. They crop up in time under certain generated congenial circumstances or conditions as called the co-existence of space, time, human effort, action and determination. It influences him to be good or bad because of its being the cause of excitement of intrinsic activities of man.
The necessaries of life-the means of livelihood, etc. were easily available in the Age of the infancy of the human race. At that time the cases of accumulation of material wealth and looting of things possessed by others were not known, as the economic needs of the people were satisfied by their collective resources.
The seed of these evil thoughts was lying embedded as dormant in that Age, but it had no opportunity to sprout under favourable conditions. As soon as a little necessity of human life increased and the means of subsistence became a little short or scarce, there arose the thought of accumulation of food-stuff and other necessaries of life in the minds of the people and consequently the thought of stealing and looting them cropped up in their minds to satisfy their needs.
Man was neither savage nor barbarian, as the so-called historians of modern age depict him, in the Ages of the infancy of the human race and Kulakarism. But the want of his subsistence made him desperate to fill up his hungry belly when it was rubbing against his backbone by adopting any means, call it savage or barbarian. He was simple, free, equal and self-ruled ; as soon as the self-rule broke down, the external force stepped in his free domain and made him submit to it for the inglorious existence of his life as demanded by the force of the so-called double-faced civilization introduced by the conquering power.
The account of the primitive gentile constitution of the Prehistoric Age as found in the Jaina Agamas finds support in the views of F. Engels on the gentile constitution of the Iroquois gens of America to a considerable extent. “And this gentile constitution is wonderful in all its childlike simplicity. Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmies or police ; without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges ; without prisons ; without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of them concerned—the gens or the tribe or the individual gentes among themselves. Blood revenge threatens only as an extreme or rarely applied measure, of which our capital punishment