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JAINA BIBLIOGRAPHY
Vivid description in a Jain tent of the Guild of painters; the colours,
P. 18. the designs.
P. 63. The sculpture which survives on the hunderds of great Hindu and Jain temples, was once painted-deep relief painted in vivid colours is the ideal Indian artistic method. Practically nothing of all this colour remains.
P. 64. The Jain faith-Jain temples do not differ in general pattern from Hindu temples. The hallows in the main shrine is an image of a Jain “Tirthankara". But the rest of the fabric, with its tracery of heavenly beings and transcendental symbolism, can easily be mistaken for Hindu.
Like the Buddhists, the Jain shared a common back ground of Indian religious and daily life with the Hindu masses. Like them they believe in continuous reincarnation. The basic principle of Jainism is “ahimsa" non-injury. The Jain believes that to the utmost of his powers, he must avoid doing an injury to any living being. The ordinary man, without a very profound religious sense, takes littte care. The Jain "Tirthankaras" are the heroes of the faith, canonically seven in number, who set the highest example to the whole Jain community by carrying ahimsā to its logical end, voluntary suicide by desiccation in a state of total immobiliry. The images of the Jain Tirthankara is always rigidly frontal, absolutely symmetrical, and naked. Sometimes as a witness to the hero's saintly immobility, creepers have grown up his legs and twined themselves round his arms. Typically of Indian art, the Jain image does not represent the saint as he must have looked, ravaged by his asceticism, but in his spiritual guise of heroic beauty.
Total sanctity can only be achieved after many, many life times of steady progress. But through out history, and still at the present day, Jain saints attain their voluntary suicides. (Incidentally the element of Jainism in Gandhi's political thinking was very important). Pillars or "Towers of fame", were erected to commemorate these events. The saint who achieves this goal is regarded as having gained final release from the endless eycle of birth, suffering and death. Beyond that Jain doctrine does not go. But it shares with the Sāmkhya tradition of Brahmanical philosophy the belife that the released spiritual entities remain distinct entities and are many. It rejects the Vedantic doctrine that released beings are absorbed in the monadic Brahman. Jain life and Jain thought have accepted much of the same fudamental vision of the Cosmic order and mathology as popular Hindusim. Whereas Buddhism derogates belief in the heavens and hells, dismissing them as illusory, Jainism accepts them simply as part of the endless cycle of material existence from which the serious man will disentangle himself as speedily as possible by absolute ahimsa. Thus imagery of the Hindu cosmic order could find in the structure of a Jain temple with scarcely any modification.
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