Jain Journal 1976 01

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

Page 23

Tirthankara: The Apostle of
Perfection and Liberation
PRADYUMNA KUMAR JAIN
Tirthankara Mahavira, the apostle of perfected soul of the human kind descended on the pious land of Jambu Dvipa 2500 years back perpetuating the antiquity of great spiritual heritage of India. He stood for a religion of liberation from all shackles whatsoever through a continuous process of emancipation of the spirit in man. He professed a philosophy of organismic sādhanā convincible to every core of intellectual moorings of the present and the past. The Tirthankara was pragmatic through and through in outlook, strict disciplinarian in action, unfathomably deep in vision and accurate to the last point in analysis of human understanding. His sadhana became thus a distinguished feature of a universal religion later named as Jaina religion.
The philosophy of Jaina religion lays its foundation stone in the very presence of human suffering. The Jaina finds every bit of present life as a symbol of deep misery and suffering. It is a fact, he conceives. Going back from this fact the analysis question-marks: why? The vision of the great one instantaneously comes to rescue the questioning agony of the intellect and relaxes it with the answer that the cause of suffering lies nowhere else but in the domain of suffering itself. The existence, which is suffering, is the very base and fountain-head of the whole malady. Existence, to his view, is the real and permeates the nerves of the whole arena of reality. Now to say that the real is existent appears to be a tautologous statement, yet the tautologous expression entails implicitly a fundamental tenet of the reality. What is real fundamentally can not be non-existent ostensibly. Thus from the viewpoint of existence the real is eternal, indestructible being. Now we revert to our original position since the existence is real, eternal and indestructible, then what is there that makes it suffer and be miserable? The question is really pertinent, worth considering hereunder.
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Suffering, however, is another name of psychology of feeling of missing of one's own being-wholly or partially. So is it, one may ask, not a contradiction in itself that an immortal being should feel its own being missing? Certainly it is. But since one feels so, it can not be denied