Jain Spirit 2000 03 No 03

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 22

JAINS HAVE A LOT TO OFFER
"The Jain community is the
best-educated group in all of the United States!
However, by tradition, what you
receive you are obliged to pass on
to others."
effort to overcome the bondage of the world. He was not a social reformer, but his teachings are rich with implications for personal and social living. He believed in the worth of all individuals, he advocated a casteless society; he rebelled against the establishment represented by the priestly caste; and was emphatically democratic.
In our century, Mahatma Gandhi came under the influence of Jainism, and he made non-violence (abimsa) the main plank of the freedom movement in India gaining her independence from the British in 1947, and thereby becoming the world's most populous democracy. Thus Jainism's emphasis on the worth of the individual; the right to call one's soul one's own; its magnificent assertion of personal autonomy; its universal scepticism; its doctrine of the relativity of all ideas and values, and its insistence on compromise, have all contributed incalculably toward the development of the democratic spirit.
This spirit should first be expressed on the level of the family. The family is the fundamental unit of the nation. With a fifty per-cent divorce rate, domestic violence, teenage pregnancies, drugs, to mention only a few of our social maladies, it is clear that the American family is in trouble. Jainism has a tradition of making and keeping vows, which function as social cement. This stabilizing factor is all the more augmented in the Indian ideal of the extended family. Even if you should choose not to become politically engaged, the health of your family will contribute to the health of the nation.
The displacement of the model of the melting pot by the onset of multiculturalism has left the identity of what it means to be an American highly ambiguous. The most common feature one can discern, as characterizing most Americans, is that we are all consumers, and that we are all members of the greatest consumer society in the whole world. Notwithstanding our 50 years of warfare with Communism, materialism abides as the driving engine of the American Dream. The message of Jainism is that a nation sows the seeds of its own demise when it confuses spirit with matter, the jiva with the ajiva. America has a soul which must be recovered; but not in the old way when the first immigrants came to these shores, seeking religious freedom, and then wound up by establishing orthodoxy of their own, complete with persecution of dissenters. Jainism is unalterably opposed to all orthodoxy, Eastern or Western. It insists that in a pluralistic society, all religious claims must be tempered by reciprocal respect and by reason.
persons are to free themselves from attachments to the world. Its ideal is the monk-one who withdraws from the world and seeks not its salvation, but his own. As such, there is little in the way of a blueprint for an ideal society. Even so, Jainism soon developed a form of community known as the sangha; the oldest voluntary religious organization in the world. Roughly, the sangha parallels the Church in Christianity. In addition, historically and philosophically, Jainism developed principles that have implications for democracy. Jainism and Buddhism are classified as heterodox, or heretical movements because they revolted against particular features of the prevailing orthodoxy, namely, Hinduism. Thus both movements became independent religions. In time, Buddhism was absorbed by Hinduism and survived only in other parts of Asia; but Jainism stood its ground and did not leave India.
Parshva and Mahavira, the last two of twenty-four Tirthankaras, are of historical significance. At the end of the ninth century BC, Parshva opposed the priestly dominance of Brahmanic culture by railing against the caste system, and by campaigning for the egalitarian inclusion of all people, regardless of caste, creed or gender. His concern for life and liberty extended to the welfare of animals, and opposed to their killing in ritual sacrifices. He preached the adoption of vows for common persons, thereby making religion universally accessible. Two hundred and fifty years later Mahavira appeared, continuing the tradition of a highly individualized
Cromwell Crawford is Professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. He recently completed a major lecture tour of India and a book on Indian Medical Ethics. The above paper was first presented at the Young Jains of America Convention in Houston, July 1998.
March - May 2000 • Jain Spirit
21
www jainelibrary.org