Jain Moral Doctrine

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

Page 15

JAIN MORAL DOCTRINE
of nature and in divinising the individual man so to say, in some manner.
Comte's Religion of Humanity had few adherents outside France and Huxley characterised it as 'Catholicism minus Christianity'. Humanity as a whole or a collective body has only a notional reality and the attribution to it of the four-fold divine features of power, apprehension, omniscience and blessedness can only be figurative. The individuals are real and each one of them can be accepted as the God. The fact of there being a number of individuals having similar natures may determine the nature of an individual in a certain manner but this does not invest the totality of the community with any real, living reality or negate the reality of the individual altogether. Comte's God was thus an unreal abstraction and could not accordingly command the heart-felt veneration of any truly religious-minded people. Another serious defect from which the socalled Religion of Humanity suffered was that it identified divinity with the ordinary experiential nature of man. Comte was right in finding his only God in the nature of man but erred in holding that a man or a collection of men, as finite beings and subject to all the ills, infirmities, misfortunes and limitations of a worldly life, could nevertheless be regarded as God. God,-in a rationalised religion is certainly the man,-or for the matter of that, any being having the principles of life and consciousness in him; but divinity attaches not to the ephemeral and the transitory aspect of the creature's nature but to what is eternal, essential and fundamental in it.
A word of caution is necessary again when recognising the divinity in the essential nature of man. An ordinary animal suffering from the vicissitudes of the ordinary life, is not God; it is only his pure nature to which divinity can be attributed, and in this sense, it is but natural to look upon the high-souled beings,-the superordinary persons who by their self-culture and self-development have realised their pure selves, as divine beings. This is done in most of the positive religions and is justifiable. But this would not warrant one to confine god-hood within the limited number of the Prophets or Messiahs of those religions. We must, on the other hand, recognise that every living being is essentially pure and has the capacity of fully developing its own nature. We must recog. nise, in other words, that every conscious creature is a God in potentiality and that when thus developed to perfection, this potential God in a living being appears in its true light i.e. as a full-fledged God with his four-fold attributes.
The basic idea of God in all religions is thus one in which he is characterised by the four-fold features of infinite power, infinite