Jain Journal 1985 01

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

Page 12

An Obsolete Heretical Sect : Early History
and Distribution in Eastern India
PRANABANANDA JASH
Though the Ajivika sect is entirely in an oblivious state in the map of modern Indian religious systems, its role during the first millenium B.C. in the history of heretical schools was unique as well as significant in many respects. Like two other contemporary heretical schools—Buddhism and Jainism, it emerged in the society with tremendous religious impact against the existing rites and rituals as well as metaphysical and cosmological affairs. It is, however, no wonder to note that almost all the avaidika teachers belonged to the same age and the same region and they responded and reacted in their respective ways which were more or less similar to the same stimuli due to stupendous socio-political and religious transformation. It is, thus, no wonder that the entire development of religion and philosophy in this period in the Gangetic Valley region, from Upanisadic gnosis to complete materialism, was but a reflection of the non-Aryan reaction to the Aryan sacrificial system and to the rigid Aryan social order of the four varņas. In course of time these two distinct dominant traditions gave rise to innumerable cross-currents, sometimes completely losing their separate identity, and at other times merging in a confluence, only to re-emerge again in a new form and dimension, and flow in opposite directions. The religious history of India is, in fact, the history of the mutual influence of these two great traditions that resulted in the transformation of the Vedic religion of the Indo-Aryans into modern Hinduism.
i Cambridge History of India, I, p. 144. As regards the background to the conflict,
it is stated in the Pramanavartika-svavrtti-tika (ed. R. Sankrityayana, p. 617618):
The unquestioned authority of the Vedas; the belief in a world-creator; the quest for purification through ritual bathings; the arrogant division into castes ; the practice of mortification to atone for sin ; --these five are the marks of the crass stupidity of the witless men.