Jain Moral Doctrine

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal

Page 14

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RELIGION AND MORALITY
himself, that his God is not exclusively his, that he has not the liberty to choose his own God nor the exclusive claim to enjoy his blessings alone. The nature of man is thus inseparably related to that of others like him. If then rationalisation requires that God is to be sought in the nature of man, there are apparent psychological reasons for an individual's looking upon his community as something divine. The State, for example, was looked upon as Divinity by some peoples and for similar reasons, the religious Brotherhood, the Church, was recognised as God by most of the social religions. The most pronounced and unambiguous form of acceptance of a collection of men as the sole Divinity is that introduced by Auguste Comte, in which the supreme God is identified with Humanity, whose worship is to be performed by an organised priesthood and church, through an elaborate system of rituals.
While it may be admitted that all rationalised religions must be based on a recognition of the other realities, separate from, yet similar to, the individual, it is never right to obliterate the individual and fix upon the 'other-element', as the sole real Divinity. For the 'other-consciousness' is not the whole of one's consciousness; if a person has the apprehension in him, of persons other than him, he has also the consciousness of himself as an indubitable direct reality. This consciousness of the individual self as the primary reality asserts itself in a prominent manner in the religious theories and practices of a people.
It is surmised that the practice of Sacrifice as a religious act was due to a sense of union or communion between a group of men and their Deity, manifesting itself in the social banquet in which all the members of the community took their part; Sacrifice was thus due to the religious consciousness in its social aspect. But on the other hand, the practice of Magic also, in some form, can be traced in all primitive religions. Magic consisted in attempts to interpret the past, to foretell the future, to cure diseases, to remove evils, to bring about health and prosperity and so on. It was believed that the powers of the magicians to do those acts were due to his acquisition of some sort of control over nature. These powers were the magician's own individual attainment and were exercised by him alone through mysterious formulas and acts. The magical acts, it has been surmised by some, were not wholly fanciful acts but some of them at least were certainly due to the magician's careful observation of some natural phenomena. Whatever that might have been, Magic as distinguished from Sacrifice, consisted in setting up an individual's strictly private relation to the divine powers