Jain Moral Doctrine

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

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JAINA ÇARITRA AS BASIS OF UNIVERSAL RELIGION AND MORALITY
an act proceeds from faith and it is done with a spirit of self-surrender. In such a case, no distinction is drawn between a religious act and a moral act,--all such acts being commandments from supreme beings. But the questioning spirit of man,-his tendency to judge and ask the 'why of every thing, cannot be suppressed long; and as a matter of fact, at certain periods in the history of every community, people have wanted to know the basis of religion and morality. To suppress this questioning spirit by saying that divine commandments are not to be questioned or examined but followed ungrudgingly, has been unsuccessful in the long run. The demand for explanation became more and more insistent. An attempt to meet this demand was to tell that God was wise, that in His infinite wisdom He knew what was good for man and that a religious or moral commandment from Him was due to his desire for doing some good to the suffering humanity. This explanation contains the important admission that the religiousness or the moralness of an act was ultimately due to its conduciveness to human welfare. What sort of welfare would give an act such religious or moral character becomes thus an important further question and we shall discuss it presently
It is, however, a matter of serious consideration whether the commanding character of an act can be retained, if we dissociate it from the idea of God as its source. The fact cannot be denied that the rationalisation of an act is inconsistent with an arbitrary command about it from without. This means that if a religious or a moral act is to be explained on a rational principle and the idea of God is also to be retained as its source,—the idea of God must itself be rationalised. In the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohamedan and the Avestan religions, God is put forward as the transcendental being who lays down commandments of religious and moral efficacy. In the Nyāya-Vaišeşika, God is the creator of the universe as well as the supreme teacher of the believers. In the Yoga system, God is conceived as 'the teacher even of all primaeval teachers of mankind'. With all this attribution of power and wisdom to God, the questioning mind tends to go further and want to know what is the rational basis of his commandments. According to the Jainas, all religious and moral injunctions do emanate from God but the eternal merit of their philosophy consists in their revolutionising the very conception of God. According to them, God is the Arhat, who was not a transcendental misty being but was one among and like other men and who became all-knowing through his self-culture and supreme moral efforts. Religious and moral commandments re
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